


heart-shaped sunglasses

by SecretReyloTrash (BadOldWest)



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Anal Play, BDSM, Canon Age Difference, Cunnilingus, Daddy Kink, Deepthroating, Escort rey, F/M, Frussy Cameo, It's Just Porn and True Love, Kylo’s Whipped, Light Bondage, Miscommunication, My Co-Writer is Lana Del Rey, Naboo Is His Family’s Italian Villa, Naked Female Clothed Male, No One Learns Anything Thank God, Pining, Praise Kink, Quiet Kylo, Rey Nobody, Rey Takes Ben’s Hand: But Modern, Rough Sex, Sex Toys, Sex Work, Smut, Sugar Baby, Sugar Daddy, Transactional Relationship, Verb Tense Changes to Indicate Flashback, facesitting, indulgence fic, proposal, rich kylo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-27
Updated: 2020-06-24
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:01:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 38,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24414010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BadOldWest/pseuds/SecretReyloTrash
Summary: Rey and her sugar daddy Kylo have their arrangement all figured out. Until he proposes.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 297
Kudos: 1700





	1. Chapter 1

He’s late: but they’ve established his time was more important. If time is money, then just dividing their separate assets by a fiscal year would prove that his time was _worth more._ If Rey searches her mind, she either invented or condensed a memory that their contract explicitly stated that. It certainly did not allow for her to be late, but him?

_Late. All the time._

Wasting his time is like an avalanche of one of those mountains made of plastic-wrapped stacks of bills. Waiting, for Rey, is like rattling a rusty tin can full of pennies. 

Her manicured nails drum the marble top of the hotel bar. There was no way to sit around and wait for it that didn’t seem like she was _sitting around waiting for it._ If he wasn’t so possessive she’d chalk it all up to letting everyone else in the room get a few sniffs in before he swept in and made his claim. Showing her off. Making her dangle before he sweeps in to pluck her up. 

_Image is very important._

She checks her phone. He’s not messaged her yet. 

There’s that tense lilt to her body as she sits at the bar with her arms crossed, lightness washes over her face when she hears in her head, something like what she’s heard a hundred times at University, _“if your Sugar Daddy doesn’t show up in five minutes, you can leave.”_

She slides her hand over to the little bar mix of nuts in front of her and chews on them with a laugh. That’s not the case: but she has to amuse herself somehow.

She flags down the bartender once she catches herself watching the glass door of the lobby to see if his imposing figure graces the _very_ edge of the revolving door. That’s a little-kid thing. Watching the very tip of a field of vision to see if someone shows up for you. Where they touch down from somewhere in space while you’d been waiting. 

She’s not doing that anymore. 

So she drinks. 

_If it’s too much—_ she had tried to say to him a month ago. She hadn’t been entirely sure what she was going to offer. One less night. One _later_ night. While she was always searching for ways to fill the endless stretch forwards, time was a finite resource to him and he couldn’t invent more of it. His schedule was the problem, not hers.

 _It’s not,_ he had snapped at her, _and if I'm being torn apart to have what I want, it’s my business._

And then there’s the oft-smothered, forbidden suggestion. _Or._ _We could just meet at your place, so I wouldn’t have to sit around a hotel bar waiting for you, and you wouldn’t have to worry about how you got yourself home afterwards._

She can’t suggest that. 

Her thumbnail almost wedges in to rest between the rows of her teeth. She fights the familiar impulse. It’s a home manicure, she keeps her nails filed short and painted dark and it spares a good deal of expense while still looking put-together, but a raw, bitten edge won’t do. Initially, she had read something about the expectations to get a manicure at least once a week when she signed on to the agency two years ago. She was balancing this and school and at the time she stuck to her guns, that being her principles, in what small way she could: she did not have time to get manicures. She had snorted at the suggestion and borrowed her roommate’s nail polish. 

There was an industry standard, and then _his_ standard. Her way was a perfectly happy medium for them. He had grimaced at the thought of her with talons attached to her fingers. 

So it still worked out.

She’s got her head turned in the general direction of the TV sets surrounding her, just for a place to look that isn’t blindly searching for him to show. Pretending she isn’t waiting may preserve some pride. The din of the bar drowns out that flare of paranoia that she’ll be waiting for nothing: no warning, no reason. 

The chair next to her scrapes out as it’s pulled away from the bar. She moves over for the seat next to her to be filled without lifting her eyes from the screens overhead. The new occupant brushes her arm as he sits. She wants to snap at him for being jostled. Then a warmth splashes across her skin at the contact. Like the sun appearing from behind the clouds. 

But she’s annoyed by the lack of text so she doesn’t stop watching the soccer match straight away.

“What are you in town for?”

A lovely pair of hands are folded on the marble beside her elbows. She focuses on them, trying to tunnel out of her own head, trying to enter into who she is on his figurative clock.

All her breath exits her nose at once. There. Managed. 

“Meeting someone,” she deflects easily. Her fingers twirl the chewed-on straw of her drink through the ice. Better the straw than her fingernails. 

“You look like you’ve been kept waiting.”

Rey tilts her head back with a wry smile and takes him in.

Kylo’s got a flush of cold weather about his cheeks, a sinuous chill that travels from his body to hers. She senses the rushing he must have done because being inside the hotel hasn’t even begun to warm him up yet. 

He signals the bartender for her check. She can feel him buzzing with impatience. 

“What gave it away?”

He bows his head close above her shoulder and wraps an arm around the back of her seat.

“Because my cock isn’t warming you up right now.”

Dirty talk as per usual: direct, simple, vulgar enough to elicit some shame but also some guilty enjoyment. And funny. Surprisingly funny, now that she knows him long enough to recognize the joke, a lightness slides under her ribs and she almost forgives the lateness. 

“You look like you’ve had a rough day,” she regards him lightly, but it’s true, and has been immediately apparent since she first looked at him. Shadows fill in the fine curves under his eyes. When things are good in his empire, he’s the picture of health. She can recognize where that control frays. 

That’s where she fits in. 

“Are you trying to pick me up?” he husks, a light smile gracing his pretty mouth. 

“I don’t know, is it working?”

She takes a slow sip of her drink. His knee is bouncing under the bar counter. Impatient. 

“It feels to me more like you’re killing time.”

She glances at the phone she’s been ignoring. A text from before he walked in glows on screen. 

**Traffic. I’ll be there soon. Be ready to leave when I get there.**

It’s probably a good idea to finish that drink. She is not, in fact, ready and he is here. It’s all in the thin line of his mouth when he signs the receipt and pockets his credit card.

She sees it in the way he helps her out of her chair when they leave the hotel bar together. The nervous jump of his hands as if left idle for too long.

Tells were hard-earned in their relationship. His inner life is on a controlled display as much as a tightly guided museum tour when all the interesting shit secretly lurked in dusty crates in a basement somewhere. Rey had to sneak past some barriers and just hope she didn’t get caught.

Maybe he saw his own actions as more mysterious, but every tic gave it away to her. He had plans. His hands kept on twitching impatiently for them.

When Kylo was fidgety, it was because there was something to be unboxed for his purposes, and he was thinking about where it was waiting for them. Itchy fingers meant toys. Without a doubt it always means toys. 

Her tells, under his watchful eyes, don’t seem to be observed to be _liked_ but are mined more thoroughly as a resource. He expects honesty from her even when it is not offered and he looks for it in every whimper. 

“You’re plotting,” she accuses.

There’s a curve to his mouth when he ushers her towards the elevator that shows her that yes, her curiosity has pleased him. He bends down to have access to her ear. No one has seductively whispered in her ear before him: and he doesn't even need to seduce her.

“You say that like it’s something sinister.”

She likes how delicately he has to move with his massive legs when they are walking in pace with one another. He’s so commanding that it’s the little things that show how attentive he is to her. 

“Isn’t it?”

He merely looks at her from across the elevator car until she shivers down to her toes.

“We’ll see.”

And that’s the last they speak until they’re behind closed doors in his suite. 

He doesn’t say anything about how she looks when he finally gets her in his room with the door shut: because it’s fruitless, she’ll have to shower off what he’s going to do to her before they leave, and he’s only thinking of what she’s going to look like ruined. 

Several black boxes are set out expectantly for her on the bed. It’s almost absurd, the little pile of gifts, how she half-expects him to stretch the cord of conical party hat under her chin and arrange it on her head, even if it’s not anyone’s birthday. 

Did whatever poor concierge who had to set this up know what was going to be done in this room?

She hops on the bed and pries them open. She’s always been _feral_ about wrapping paper, especially when the kind he has done is just a matte black. The sounds of tearing always warm him up a little bit. 

In seconds the carnage of her kill rests in shreds on the floor. 

“Pretty,” she says appreciatively, lifting each item individually in her hands and holding them up in the light. The visual is important. 

_You don’t leave a good present sitting in the box,_ he told her once, those long legs crossed as he leaned back to watch her when she had pried off the lid of a jewelry box, _you show it off._

Even if these presents are clearly for him.

He huffs as he observes this. His eyes are dark and wild. It baits a sort of breathlessness when she looks at him that reminds Rey of a nature documentary she once saw of a lion stalking an antelope: and how with every tense pulse of muscle and locked eyes she became closer to secretly rooting for the lion. 

“Thank you,” she adds, because even if it’s a present for himself, he likes her polite.

He is completely ignorant of that expected courtesy when he sifts his hand into her hair. Out comes the loose bun as he looks down at the gifts in her hands.

A lovely, thick cock rests in her palm. The color of Onyx, and despite looking out of place in the elegantly wrapped box, it loses all absurdity in the light when she looks from the gift up to him. In her other hand, cradled more delicately, is a plug of the same color. 

They’ve used these types of items before. It was always deliberate, like how it feels now, without the spontaneous touch of being dug out of a familiar drawer to be used as it was thought of in the moment. 

He knows what he likes and is prepared to have it.

Kylo steps to her and first takes the plug out of her hand, pressing the tapered end to her mouth. She slides it in and seals her lips around it, sucking with her eyebrows raised at him. 

He nods. 

_Get it wet._

Obediently, absently, she works it in her mouth: keeping her eyes on him to await further instruction.

The fist in her hair tightens.

“I’ve had a hard day,” he says, and if it’s a command or a seduction it succeeds at both in the odd way that it’s so _purposeful._ She straightens a little, raising her eyebrows as she sucks. “I want you to be a good girl for me.” 

She shifts her hands to the zipper of her dress, mouth sealed around the plug, and gives him a look in question.

“Yes,” he says, but instead of letting her unzip he moves behind her and takes her dress off of her himself. He strips her fully while her mouth is busy. When she’s naked, he takes her hands and capably guides her to the bed. Then he picks up the black ribbon cast aside from the boxes and uses it to bind her wrists. 

The dildo gets tucked into her elbow: just a little extra task to balance it without using her hands. 

She tests the silky bonds and confirms for him they are comfortable and, more importantly, that they work. His eyes track the motion of her raised wrists twisting against the ribbon. With a swallow, he closes his hand around the whole of her joined, tied wrists. His fingers can touch around the other side when he does so. She closes her own eyes and lets out a deep breath. It’s like when he uses toys on her, he needs to remind her what his body can still do. 

Then he lies back on the sheets in his black suit and motions her up to take her place on his mouth. 

Her elbow tightens against her ribs to keep the silicon cock from slipping to the floor.

She moves delicately on her knees as she climbs up him, taking a moment to pause with her hands on his chest, because she wants to lose her balance at the right moment. Her weight lands where she wants it, her body caging his against the bed, and suckles the plug pointedly like a pacifier so it bobs in her mouth. It’s a visceral sight when her cheeks hollow, lips plumping and sounds of sucking. 

Simple but effective. His eyes are locked on the present in her mouth. 

She does take a moment to give herself a deep breath and look at him. In the first meeting she comforted herself that she could do much worse for an arrangement like this. Her eyes skating over him as if too scared to look closely. He wasn’t hideous. Not bald either. Physically fit. 

Time has softened that assessment. He is handsome, in a specific way, one where her eye lingers to try and figure his beauty out. His hair was a massive part of that beauty: thick and gorgeous and almost pleasurable to touch when she ran her fingers through it. His body was an impressive feat, solid, strong, capable. 

Her body hovering over his feels power in that knowledge. It’s a predatory feeling she has like this. It’s thrilling. It’s what makes this interesting. She _could_ just tune out their meetings and only remember them in broad, cursory strokes, but she doesn’t. 

She honestly wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t a little fun. Not for this long. 

Kylo shivers in appreciation at her pointed, teasing sucking. _Worth it._

She tries not to grin around the toy when he gets impatient and hauls her up over his face. 

This act was never done so _neatly_ before she met Kylo. Her hips rocking over his mouth, her legs tight and rigid because he told her, muttering darkly into her thigh before marking it with a bite, to not get his clothes dirty. 

She can get messy. _He_ wasn’t changing before dinner. 

For a moment, she pulls the plug out of her mouth, the slender nub that her ass would flower around clenched between her fingers like a ring pop. This is disobeying, but he doesn’t seem to catch that yet. 

“I’m working my mouth very hard for you, it’s a shame to waste it.”

He pushes her off only to growl against her sex. Defiance will be crushed tonight. 

“Keep it there until I tell you.”

Her eyes roll but the plug enters her mouth again. 

His finger dips from her soaked folds to her ass. There’s that initial stretch and then the yielding acceptance that she owes all to him. To what they’ve been doing together. 

He then plucks the plug from her mouth himself and it wanders down her body in his hand, first playing in her juices before sliding further back.

A hiccupping moan escapes her when he presses the toy inside. Everything feels tight and full and _good._ She bears down hard on his mouth, bound hands grasping at his hair.

There’s a teasing, coaxing little flick of his tongue inside her. He’s very focused, skilled at finding a rhythm that works for her, so this little random tap of his tongue feels more like a pat on the head, a kiss. 

She’s still holding the dildo in the crook of her elbow. With a little struggle, due to her bonds, she maneuvers it into her hand and hovers it teasingly over his busy face. 

“Where do I put this?”

He lifts her off of his mouth to answer.

 _“I’ll_ _show you.”_

Then he bites her thigh so hard her whole body tenses up. That stinging, radiating pain so close to her flushed pussy makes her absolute mush for him.

He knows how he wants it: and that’s how it ends up how he wants it so fast. 

Before long she’s on her knees on the bed, the two toys stuffed and snug inside her. The dildo keeps her nice and full, the thick length of it weighs heavy in her belly as she holds her ass up obediently for him, the plug nestled deep. 

Her mouth is nice and runny with drool for his cock, which is slipped in deep to fuck her throat. Her saliva dribbles onto his thighs and wets his shoved-down black underwear.

She feels a sigh of relief spill from his lips. 

_“Good girl.”_

It took work to reach this point. She was pretty confident in her dick-sucking abilities when she met him, even if he was the first person she had this kind of relationship with. She liked teasing him with her lips and tongue. She liked sucking him. Playing with him. Having him breathlessly heave his chest from her sheer power over him.

But it wasn’t about her skill. It was about being open.

 _This_ took a little more work from them both. Trust between them. For her to take his cock deep in her throat like she is now. Hungry. Passive. Loving it. 

He did teach her well. Even now, breathing through her nose is second nature, even when she shivers with nerves at having him so deep in her throat. It’s like swimming laps. There’s a rhythm to it. It became hypnotic the more she did it.

Eventually he lets up on the way he thrusts into her mouth, his massive hands cradling her head. He slows and she can tell he just needs a moment to look at her. 

She’s overflowing for him and that seems to be how he wants her. There was a tension in the moment before she’s perfectly full, used in every hole, before he relaxes completely. 

The fingers are no longer twitching. He’s satisfied. Peace washes over him, and just from his body, it practically flows through him to her. 

The image of her must have matched the idea he had in his head. He never implies that the real thing ever surpasses it: but she can tell when she’s done her part perfectly and this is one of those moments. 

He groans and leans back on his heels, briefly vacating her mouth. The fullness was so complete that she lets out a pathetic sound when her mouth is empty.

His cock is so hard, right in front of her face, and he looks wild. 

Her bound hands twitch in the sheets. He pulls his hips back further when she arches her neck towards him. She wants to crawl just to put him back inside her. 

She almost snorted in his face when they first met and he told her he didn’t like _pretending._ That he wouldn’t tolerate it. To Rey, pretending was going to be the whole job. She really thought she could lie back and tune out everything: he was a handsome guy, he was generous, and when she wasn’t with him she could be her own. 

She thought it would translate to being her own in secret even if he was with her, some part he would never be able to reach. 

That didn’t work for Kylo. 

“Please,” she struggles through her messy mouth, precum and spit falling from her lips. It’s like she drops them there at his knees in offering. Her jaw aches. There’s that twisty feeling where it’s just degrading enough and it dances on that edge that he likes: she’s asking because she wants it, even if she’s embarrassed, because she’s honest with him.

There’s a hunger in her eyes to really nurse on that dick he’s currently depriving her of. Lush mouth and soft, sucking tongue, making it good. All she wants to suckle on his cock until the playing field is at least a little leveled. If it ever can be.

Because he has her, all of her, at that moment. 

When he comes back to her and hoists her forward onto his cock with his hands on her ass, she moans around the length of him so hard he lets out a grunt as his head falls back. Her spine arches so he’ll get the hint to play with his toys seated deep in both her holes. A hand darts down to do just that. All the motion stimulating her nerves, the feeling of being so full, all of it is so much and yet until she cums it won’t be enough—

“You know what I want,” he tells her with little ceremony. “You want it too.”

Rey lets go. He has composed for her, down to the nearest detail, a type of bliss she’s too scared to put to words. The least she can do is enjoy it as it crests into something so powerful it leaves her fingers and toes numb. 

Everything’s fine, everything taken care of. There is little security in the world Rey knows, but there was complete security in this.

Kylo’s going to handle everything. 

* * *

  
  


_“How’d it go?”_

Rey’s pulling an earring free from her lobe in the front seat of her car. It’s not new, but it’s paid for, and she swears it drives a hundred times smoother ever since that changed. 

“Fine,” she says blandly, trying to ignore the knowing tone from the other end of the line. 

It’s not a complete anomaly for a contract to last as long as theirs has. It’s possible but just unlikely. At least, so she’s told. This is both the shortest and longest connection she’s had of this nature because it’s the only one she’s ever had. 

On paper it is a cold, dead thing. Schedules, contracts. It’s a little more _alive_ than all that in practice. She never knows what to expect from Kylo: she knows what to wear and when to show up and what her limits are. The contract between them is more of an employee handbook of protocol so she knows what’s expected _of her._ The agency protects her. The contract guides her. And then Kylo’s got his own ideas. 

She tosses the earring in the car’s cup holder. It lands with the sound of money that ends with a dull thud.

Maz’s crackly voice warms her ear with a chuckle.

“Was he too rough on you?”

The sweat that was rolling off her skin as he worked her in the hotel suite has since cool and soaked into her clothes. She shivers, but doesn’t want to start her car just yet, leaving it dark and asleep in the side of the street.

“Not at all,” Rey’s voice is crisp as she pulls a hoodie over the dress she changed into before dinner that he had waiting for her in the suite’s closet. It probably cost more than this car. 

She doesn’t know why she chooses to indicate to Maz that the date is safely over when she hasn’t even driven away from the hotel where she met him. Even if it’s agency policy, it’s not like they’re waiting up for her until she does. She could be home and showered before she hashed it all out. 

But that never happens. She calls right away.

Making a routine of things made it easier.

He still took her out to dinner after he ravaged her. A short dinner, because he had to be up in the morning, or take another call tonight. It would have been much shorter if she took up his offer to shower first, just her, while he fielded some emails in the room. But Rey isn’t particularly picky about these things: she freshened up and chose getting an appetizer over washing off what little shame she could still manage after all this time. On this night she can still taste Merlot and steak sauce, but depending on the order of events sometimes she manages to take this call while her mouth is still experiencing the lingering taste of his cum.

“He was a perfect gentleman?”

Rey snorts.

_Tell that to my jaw._

“I would _never_ say that.”

Maz’s growl of acknowledgement is familiar. Even if there was no one working for Maz stupid enough to apply the pretense of love to these arrangements, of course her agency had to devolve into at least a subtle and practical level of matchmaking if they were going to bother filling out a profile. Maz was attentive in following up with both Kylo and Rey separately, apparently in some show of approval. 

She never knew how to be candid during these calls, or if she even should be. They were mainly to ensure that someone knew she was safe and sound. She certainly made mental notes of the details of their interactions for her own use. But she isn’t sure if she should tell Maz that they had sex before going out, which was usually because he didn’t feel like talking that night. This was planned so she was sloppy but serene by the time he ordered her a steak and watched her eat it, fascinated, while he took a call at the table. 

_How are you feeling?_ She’d managed woozily as he said goodbye to her at the end of the night. Faintly, she recalled there had been mention of a bad day.

He gave her a tight nod.

_Just fine._

She can’t lie, but maybe it was in the contract, somewhere she must have missed, that he still could.

“We usually don’t pair new girls with untested clients, so I want to be sure Mr. Ren is still treating you well.”

Two years wasn’t new, especially if all two years were with him. He demanded exclusivity: so he claimed all her experience. The concern was comforting in the beginning, now it was unnecessary. Maz just liked to pry. 

“I wouldn’t go back for a second time if he wasn’t.”

_Let alone a hundredth._

Rey bows her head for a moment to unfasten the ankle strap of her shoes that are starting to pinch. It’s for just a flash that she’s not watching the street, and still she nearly misses it when it happens.

The sleek black car slides away into the night. She’s never seen a car stalk like an animal before. It manages to vanish like it wasn’t even there. 

Rey leans over the center console to watch the empty street for a moment.

She never sees the car show up for him or gets a glimpse of him getting in, but she has this weird feeling about leaving before he’s left. 

Now he’s gone.

She sits back in her seat. It’s like she finally lets out a breath when she knows he’s gone.

“Well, he is equally happy with you. He has placed a request for booking a longer engagement, has he spoken to you about these plans?”

“He barely speaks at all,” she pulls a pack of makeup wipes out of her glove compartment. With exhaustion overtaking her, she turns on her overhead light and mops off her face using the rearview mirror. “How long?”

“A week. International travel would be involved.”

Rey wriggles to grab her planner from the back seat. 

He’s taken her on the occasional trip before. A few conferences for work when he needed arm candy and where she spent a weekend going to cocktail parties and being very spoiled. Her first interest in travel is rarely shopping, but it’s usually what he sends her off to do and she gets herself some nice things. 

Because when he tells her to shop on the credit card he provides, it is not a request. 

More recently, he’s brought her along to a few weddings. Nothing in the family or any close personal relations. She’s met none of them. She’s grateful for that because it feels too complicated. She doesn’t belong in his surroundings just as he doesn’t belong in hers. Just people he works with, so she has been familiarized with that crowd. But no close friends. He’s never a groomsman. She never knows what the gift that’s given half in her name is and they don’t go to any afterparties. They dance, they drink, Rey shoots the shit with the other regulars at the reception that have come to consider her a regular at these things as well. It’s when this falsehood has begun to feel its most glaring, because of the abundant photographs taken of these events, Rey will be a face from this phase of his life in an aspect of undeniable reality. 

The nature of her presence will just remain undisclosed. 

When she’s in a new city it’s weird to show up, sit quietly in a place of worship for various religions with maybe the most Godless man she knows, and dance her way into exhaustion before being reclaimed at a reasonable hour to then have sex with that same man and be too tired for anything else. When she’s in a new city she doesn’t really want to spend so much time showing off her purchases in a hotel suite for the approval of the man who bought them. 

She just wants to...wander.

She can use her own money to travel the way she wants. If she wants. 

She’s just busy with school and...this.

“You’re not giving me a lot of details,” but her planner is already on her lap, open at the ready.

 **Kylo** is listed for today’s little square, as he is three days a week every week. Idly, Rey scrawls **light bondage,** **deep throat, triple penetration w/toys.**

Maz’s laugh fills her ear.

“He wants it to be a surprise: but he gave us all the information about the arrangements. He said to disclose to you whatever information would make you comfortable agreeing.”

Rey purses her lips as she considers this. She could expect from Kylo a completely drafted itinerary for whatever he had planned for her. The agency would demand a copy for safety reasons: although Rey could go in blind as long as they knew the particulars. Yet he gave carte blanche to spoil the surprise if it was what she wanted. 

But that wasn’t really interesting. 

However, she can practically feel Maz _glow_ with smugness on the other side of the phone. Evidence that this all was a _massive success._ People had the particularly bad habit of treating the connection between her and Kylo as proof the experiment was working. The competence of the agency, the very concept of sugar babies, the entire sex industry itself. 

He was an easy man to tolerate and a rewarding one to play with. That was it. 

Underneath her notes on tonight’s activities, she adds **Late.** **Mood: Agitated. Trouble at work?**

She looks up at herself in the mirror in disgust. These notes used to be for her. For some semblance of control. 

Her half-illuminated reflection glares back at her. It’s the only speck of light close enough to touch the shadows on her skin. She looks as tired as she feels.

She doesn’t like to think of Kylo when he’s not there, in the physical form or the form of his frequent gifts specifically requesting she _think of him_. She doesn’t like his spirit to touch outside the boundaries. And yet she does want to let go again, immediately, and know it will be alright. 

But there’s one thing Rey hates more than trusting people and it’s being told to trust people.

“So he wants me to be surprised,” Rey takes a deep breath, tapping her pen against the page. “Just give me the dates he needs me.”

* * *

He doesn’t brighten when he sees her arrive —it’s not like that— but she does have his full attention whenever she walks into the room, which is his most valuable asset. 

His fingers pause from typing whatever text or email he’s typing on his phone and slips the device dutifully in his pocket. The lounge of the bar seems to shrink to only accommodate his presence, she hefts her bag up her arm to quicken her pace over to him.

He stands and kisses her cheek gently in greeting. He’s provided her with a sleek monogrammed leather weekender bag for their first trip. Parsing out her initials for the work to be done was a rare point of contention between them (Rey did not have a middle initial because she didn’t have a middle _name)._ She’s packed it with some of his wardrobe selections for her: it’s weird for them to have her bring anything more personal than her own toothbrush for overnights but this is more substantial than a wedding on the Cape.

“You don’t look excited,” he teases with a wolfish grin. The grin is reserved for so public a setting. It’s not fake, but it’s at least an exaggeration. 

She tries not to wince, because lying is nearly impossible. He’s a shark. 

“I’m not looking forward to the flight,” she replies apologetically. “I get all fidgety.”

“I’m sorry,” he eases himself out of the way of the furniture surrounding them, “for what can’t be helped. I hope you’ll be comfortable on the plane. I promise I’d never make you fly commercial.”

“I’m just looking forward to the surprise, it’ll be hard to sit still” she amends honestly. 

He starts walking, so she keeps up. There’s a brisk pace that actually seems like he’s cheerful. She intentionally spoke like she didn’t know anything, and she truly didn’t, unspoiled for his surprise. It’s clear by the business-like manner he possesses that this has pleased him considerably. 

“So you decided to let me surprise you?”

He actually seems to relax when he says it. He must have been true to his word to the agency: if she wanted it spoiled for her sanity, she could have gone on knowing every detail and he would have lost every ounce of the control he craved. 

“If I say that, will you tell me what it is?”

The lobby is brighter than the bar: it floods her with afternoon sunlight as they enter the world together. It’s not impossible to see the man in daylight, but it took about a year for any opportunity for Kylo to prove he was not in fact a vampire to her. 

There’s an amused purr deep in his throat. 

“I don’t want you pretending to be surprised,” he leads them over to the car idling on the curb. He tends to drive himself to their meetings, but it’s not unheard of for him to use his driver, especially when they were flying somewhere, “so either you stay in the dark or we start discussing what you’re most looking forward to in exact details when we land.”

She glances over her shoulder at him when he opens the door for her.

“Don’t worry, I stayed up all week practicing my fake-gasp.”

She demonstrates with a hand pertly over her ajar mouth. He gives her a glare that eases from his features when he sees how much she milks the fakeness of the gesture. Something softens in his eyes. He will not tolerate being laughed at, and sometimes it takes him a moment to discover she’s laughing with him.

She’s maybe made him laugh, if not externally.

Faking it with him isn’t much of a possibility. 

“All I know is I need my passport. But hints are appreciated. What country? What _continent?”_

His thumb moves up to gently stroke her cheek. She clings to the open car door and swallows thickly. She’s teasing, but he seems intent and sincere for a strange moment.

“Wherever I want you,” he muses, smiling to himself, “now get in.”

He’s made use of a private jet before, or at least loaned the private jet of some member of the board he clearly doesn’t like, but this one is not that plane. 

That one was, as much as it went without saying, _showy_ for a private jet. Unnecessary amounts of gilt decoration for a mode of transportation. There had been a stripper pole assembled by the bar. That seemed detrimental if turbulence occurred, but after a few in-flight cocktails and hours spent staring in judgement of that tacky thing together on a flight to California, he’d managed to coax her to do an improvised, deeply unskilled dance around the pole for him. 

That was just for them. 

“I have some last-minute work to get done while we’re in the air,” he informs her once she’s handed a cocktail after they take off. 

She smothers her reaction in a sip and nods. This is not uncommon. It’s just that planes are _boring_ when she’s not allowed in the cockpit.

She blinks away from her guarded observation of the cabin.

This plane actually feels like something he’d own: efficient, powerful, and not _overly_ indulgent. This feels like a mode of travel for a politician, not a former felon with a reality show. It feels weird to weigh the differences of his _access_ to private jets versus _ownership_ of a private jet. Both were things she’d never dream of anyway, but the distinction was something she wanted to make note of, even if she wasn’t sure why. 

“I guess you’re not getting a dance this time,” she muses, gesturing around the cabin of the jet, sorely lacking in any stripper poles. 

He glances up from his laptop. 

“You’re a smart girl,” he has that disinterested boss tone, one that oozes that this is _not his problem,_ “I’m sure you’ll think of something.”

She sighs and curls up in one of the big chairs by the windows. They’re over the Atlantic right now, so she wants to rule out Asia, but that doesn’t exactly narrow things down. His typing is so smooth and unending it goes from annoying straight back to soothing. She slips her planner out of her bag, something she always keeps safely stowed in her car or left at home for the weekend when she’s with him. 

She just likes having it. There’s a weird level of physical evidence to it, a time-lapse in paper form. It used to be appointments and schedules, the rushed chaos she barely looked twice at back when she was a sloppy student. But he was so organized, it rubbed off on her. He even bought her this nice Filofax when he saw the miserable excuse of a notebook that contained half of her entire life, the rest in scattered pieces and lost documents. He probably hadn’t thought it would be overrun by papercraft bits-and-bobs, her inability to throw out a single piece of scrap, and basically every sticker of a place where she stepped foot where there were stickers. 

She glances sideways at him and flips to the previous month. They haven’t talked about it, but this trip seems...big, somehow. She can’t put her finger on why. She’s torn through her little notations of the last dozen or so appointments to see if there was any sign his life was spiraling out of control, but she didn’t find anything. 

Her fingers trace a penciled-in Wednesday— _a uniformly shitty day,_ he insisted, _so let’s give us something to look forward to for getting through them_ —where her notes are about as banal as ever. 

**Kylo: shower sex, room service, stayed in to watch a movie.**

He wasn’t a person she pegged as someone who particularly liked movies, and they never just _stayed in,_ but it was nice at the time to just curl up in bed with him and not have to touch up her entire face after sustaining Chinese Water Torture on her clit with a detachable shower head. 

She cracks her knuckles when an odd memory slips through.

_Their first date was a movie._

Her fingers slide to grip her pen. A very long movie. 

Mood-tracking wasn’t uncommon for girls with planners, but mood-tracking the moody rich guy who paid her for sex seemed a little overkill. But it helped. It was a record for a day on the job that she could revisit. 

Though these records are failing her for any sign that he’d gotten a promotion, or fired, or arrested. Something she’d be able to pin this strange decision on. If she didn’t know him any better, this would seem like a genuine vacation.

“Is this jet yours?”

He glances at her, a little stunned. His wealth is what this relationship is built on, but Rey was rarely direct about it. Her agency was always willing to provide a profile of Net Worth and all the filthy details, but she’d never pursued it. She still doesn’t want to look into whether his money is particularly dirty. 

She’s using it for school. That is a good enough use for it. 

“It’s a family plane,” he answers quietly, looking back at his screen. “If you’re bored, use your iPad.”

She buries her nose in her Filofax, sniffing once, suddenly _fascinated_ with her own planner. It’s better than obeying. There’s a list of textbooks from next semester that she’s outlining based on what she might add or drop. Senior spring. He’d warned her she might get fussy about what she wants on her way out. 

As she sulks, she feels him move in the chair beside her. He delicately slides a strand of hair behind her ear, opening up her face to him when she’d let it hang there as a barrier. His knuckles gently scrape along the curve of her jaw. She glances at him out of the corner of her eye, pretending not to.

He’s not even looking at her as he caresses her. But it is soothing.

She flips petulantly to another page of her planner. Last month. His birthday. He’d spent it alone with her.

 **Kylo: Birthday. Ball gag, spreader bar, handcuffs.** All of her tied up and silent and under his control. It was what he had wanted. 

_Maybe I want to talk to you, asshole._

* * *

“This is...really special,” she admits, warmed from the lingering waves of all the surprises. 

He leans back in his his seat, his chest inflating with pride. 

“I’m glad you like it,” his entire demeanor is the kind of attentive that has really only ever been available from him during sex. 

He’d called the estate _Varykino_ in a knowing tone, so he has been here before, probably owned it and let it sit for 359 of the year. This bastard had a stone palace waiting in Italy for him and he took it for granted. 

She’s trying not to be bitter, she rarely is about idle wealth when she’s profiting off of it, but this place is so magical she can’t help but resent him for every day he’s not here.

She had been nervous when they landed in Italy and relieved when he hadn’t taken her somewhere like Milan or Paris, where she had predicted she’d just be shopping for a week. This was a lake retreat that was surrounded by the Alps in the distance, right on the water, and deliciously secluded. She didn’t have to sit around trying on shoes and clothes to show off for him. They dropped their bags at the door and seemed to be there to enjoy the natural offerings, not commercial ones. 

He watched her all afternoon as she touched her hands to the icy lake water, tanned herself in a tiny bikini all for his benefit, and marveled at the sun setting over the mountains. 

Once things were at their least radiant, the blazing afternoon changing scenes to the richness of night, she’d flopped onto the massive king-size bed in the room they’d be sharing. Just lay there in her clothes, over the covers, savoring the moment to rest.

He’d made a show of how they’d be sharing this room for the week, despite not needing the appearance of a normal relationship like their other trips. It’s not like they stayed over on the nights they met up: falling asleep in the same bed was a non-essential when they were both home. Those homes were separate. 

Here it’s a massive house with no other occupants other than staff. He could keep her as close, or as far away, as he wanted. 

She must really trust him because she’s soothed by that instead of scared.

She had tried not to think too much of this while she tested the heavenly mattress before dinner. Especially as he came up to fold himself over her body on the bed and brush her hair aside from her sun-warmed skin. 

He pressed a kiss to the nape of her neck, permitting a jet-lagged nap before a late dinner. 

“Don’t over-sleep, or you’ll be up all night.”

She snorted into the perfectly downy pillow.

“And you have no use for _that—”_

He swatted her ass with a firm hand. She cried out and then reveled in her voice echoing through the high eaves of the ceiling. There was something thrilling in that echo, the length of it, her own voice splintering into fragments thrown about the house. 

His big palm slowly circled the curve of her ass. The skin was all warmed up and that friction afterwards over her clothes just made for a pleasant burn.

 _“Be good,”_ he added as an afterthought. It was clear the way he was collecting himself off of her that he had matters to attend to and she would go disappointingly unmolested during her nap.

“I’m going to touch myself _all over_ the bed when you’re gone,” she sassed back.

It was a pleasant afternoon despite the long flight over. There was something especially good that she didn’t even want to think about. 

Not a dime was spent since they walked through the door, until dinner, at least. And she’s had the best time. His attention has been undivided and it makes her blush a little that he doesn’t once glance at his phone. She likes him better this way. She doesn’t know how to tell him that. If it breaks some rule. 

But it’s clear what he slipped away during her nap to plan from the moment she sits down for dinner. The meal is lavish. 

Dinner tables are tough for him, she can always tell, when he can’t be on the phone. He can manage unwinding with her for an hour, but she does notice when he needs to shift back into work mode. He eats because he needs to, lingers because she’s giving him company, but it’s an instinct to be fed that he’s clearly trying to lighten up with her presence. 

_“My mother could never put the goddamn phone down,”_ he excused himself to her, only once, _“It’s a nasty habit I’ve picked up. I’m sorry.”_

It didn’t mean he stopped, but her hands shook as she almost made a note of it later that night, a strange line the only mark she could manage to put down, but the ink always reminded her when she saw it what the page _didn’t_ say.

He needs the vacation more than she does. And if she’s the reason he gives it to them both, then she’d say this arrangement worked for the two of them.

This meal, however, has been slow and meandering and so many courses she’s ready to burst. No sign of dessert in sight: just plate after plate that made her want to start crying with each first bite. They’re dining on a beautiful patio and soft music plays from the speakers, an Opera he told her the Italian name of despite that bearing no meaning to her. The sky is a cosmic, velvety indigo and so dense she feels like she can slide up it straight to the moon. 

It’s strange: he couldn’t give her this sky like a gift. But him showing her this sky meant more to her than anything he handed off to her in the two years she’d been seeing him.

She’s done this long enough to know that sometimes the pleasure came from just having a receptive partner. She wouldn’t make it through this trip if she kept questioning everything, and he’d notice her getting colder with doubt if she did. She’s done a good job at sitting back and letting the generosity surround her, even for a little while. 

She is curious though. She tries to hide it right before a sip of wine:

“What did you have in mind for us while we’re here?”

He shakes his head.

“Nothing so regimented, if you’re looking for that, I’m afraid. I thought we’d enjoy this time together.”

The greatest surprise of all. She half-expected some eccentric European instructor was going to show up in the morning and this was going to turn into a five-day training retreat for advanced shibari or another one of his more—intense—pursuits. 

She raises her eyebrows when there’s no catch. Even if she’s just a live-in girlfriend for a couple of days. It’s less work than balancing this and school. Just being in it without having to carefully extract herself out. 

“You also earned it after this semester.”

Her nose wrinkles in disbelief. _This_ is what she deserved for her lowest GPA in two years? It wasn’t just that it was absurd for her to be rewarded for this semester at all. That this was the most elaborate of all of his gifts to her, multiple days in the Italian countryside, for _that?_

“I don’t think you should encourage anything about my performance this academic semester.”

“You worked your hardest,” his eyes narrow at her, “and didn’t give up.”

_Why is he still on this?_

“Thank you,” she bats her eyelashes at him instead of arguing, holding her glass out in a toast, “it’s very kind of you to treat me to this.”

He looks away from her for a moment, fumbling his hand in his jacket pocket with a sigh. She furrows her brows. 

“This is a family home,” he says softly, reaching for her hand. She raises her eyebrows at him. The incredulity giving way to surprise. 

“Oh,” she glances around the stone walls as if she needs to be more aware of them. This place held memories. That or ghosts. “Does—does this mean I’m meeting your family here?”

That was a little too close for comfort. 

Tension pulls at the elegant curves of his mouth. He shakes his head, his thumb rubbing a circle against the back of her hand.

She lets out a sigh of relief. 

“My maternal grandmother grew up here.” 

This surprises her. He wanted to be so guarded about information about the family plane. This is a pleasant enough thought, as long as she doesn’t have to see any baby pictures.

She looks back out on the water. 

“I would dream about growing up somewhere like here.”

Vulnerability creeps into her voice: something she didn’t mean to let slip and wishes she could shove back into her mouth. Shamefully, the words echo across the perfectly still surface. The confession lingers between them for a painfully long moment.

“I actually hadn’t set foot on the property until I was in my twenties. But I knew it was special when I came.”

Rey straightens her chin at him, not sure why he’s told her this. He wasn’t big on details, especially personal. He said it was a family home. Why hadn’t he been here with his family?

“This is something I wanted to share with you,” he tightens the hand around hers. She doesn’t know why she feels a shot of adrenaline straight through her bloodstream when he adjusts his grip on her hand. Regardless of how casual he’s trying to be, he has something planned, and this feels like he’s trying to keep her from running away. 

“Rey, I’d like to ask you how you feel about our current arrangement.”

She sucks on her lower lip, dreading what’s coming. She doesn’t even question that they’re about to collide into a brick wall. She’d been warned about these arrangements. You get sucked in fast and then are rid of even faster. 

“I’m enjoying where things are.”

 _Don’t look clingy._ She knew it had to end eventually. If he brought her here as a goodbye, then he’d already made up his mind. 

She fidgets in her seat and nods after she’s finished, like she’s said all she needs to say. He looks at her carefully. Whatever reaction he expected, it’s clear now it wasn’t _vague_ and _flippant._

“Where do you see this arrangement taking us?”

She takes a deep breath. Maybe he’d make her participate in making the plan that phased her out for someone else. That almost sucks more than being dropped completely just because he was bored. 

She could grit her teeth and be a realist. If he wants her to initiate the end like it’s her idea. To be something flicked aside out of boredom. 

And yet she can’t bring herself to say _nowhere_ like any person with eyes would have said. 

Thanks to him, she was debt-free. She wouldn’t be evicted anytime soon with what she had in savings. Even her student loans were handled. And there was always a contingency plan. She used to think about everything she’d pawn when it was over, the designer clothes she wore out of obligation, the jewelry that was too nice to keep for her daily life. It used to be almost an inventory of what she could pawn to save what. Food. Shelter. Her car. 

But now it was just a mass she lived amongst, her small fortune, and she wasn’t sure she’d worry about liquidating it immediately with him out of the picture. 

She’d spent so long without having to use her contingency plan, she was no longer certain it worked as a contingency plan. He’d gotten her to a place where frankly she didn’t need him anymore, especially so close to graduation.

Maybe she’d just be alone.

“I think, when it works, you don’t go looking for a way to change it.”

His touch moves to fingertips on her wrist, gentle and soothing. 

“That’s an apt assessment. Our arrangement suits this phase of my life very well, as I believe it does your own. But you will be graduating soon enough, and from your enthusiasm for your chosen field, I assume you will be pursuing a career full-time.”

_If you say that this is what’s best for me, I’ll murder you._

“I am approaching some major life changes,” she tries not to sound like she’s completely shut down, but it’s an automatic response. “We can renegotiate when the time comes…”

He’s still playing with her hand. 

“That’s what I’m _trying_ to do—”

She clams up. Mostly because, while this is a fair conversation, it feels more serious than her requesting to meet a different weeknight or him insisting he isn’t going to pay the same to see her less. That might happen, but it couldn’t be predetermined, and she doesn’t want to talk about it now.

His fingertips glide along her own fingers. Down the back of her knuckles to the tips, and then down the soft undersides to her palm.

“—while you're finding your place in all this. I’d like for us to be searching together. To provide for you. To protect you. To offer you everything you deserve.”

She straightens in her chair, not realizing how much she had slumped over during the course of this conversation. 

_“What?”_

Now she really has no clue what he’s talking about.

He squeezes her hand as if to gather his own strength, and then kneels down on the patio. She can’t quite get over how bizarre it looks. He is not a man to kneel.

Kylo takes a jewelry box out of the pocket of his jacket. That’s not an unfamiliar sight between them. He buys her lots of jewelry, and looks the other way when she hoards it rather than wears it. 

She’s a little too drained from this conversation to pretend to care about a trinket: but he’s not letting go of her hand. 

His free hand snaps open the box and inside rests an engagement ring.


	2. Chapter 2

“I  _ hate _ this part.”

Kylo sat back in his armchair, his long legs spread wide open, a drink in one hand and the other fanned over his jaw, obscuring the half-amused smirk on his face. 

He wasn’t a laugher. And there was no humor in his voice when he dropped his hand to issue an order:

“You always say this. Come on. Show me what I’m paying for.”

He didn’t look like a boss: he looked like  _ the  _ boss. It was indescribable how he radiated power from something so simple as a black suit and a loose, invulnerable stance. 

Rey growled at him. 

She rarely embodied a brat in his presence, the money was just too good: but this was one of the conditions of their contract that always drove her nuts. 

She wanted to protest but she knew his answer already:

_ You’re the one who wanted it this way. If you reported your grades to me throughout the semester like I asked, then we wouldn’t have this whole production every quarter where I have to be surprised. _

She fumbled with her open laptop. She wasn’t a high achiever before their arrangement. She was smart and she wanted her upcoming degree to count towards an actual qualification for her career, but that didn’t mean that she needed to bust her ass  _ on top _ of all the other jobs she took on to get her way through school for that degree.

Kylo wanted a reward system involving her grades from the moment he found out she was a university student. That went in the contract after a good deal of negotiating. It wasn’t punitive the way he described it. Just incentive to push herself. He was strangely complimentary about how intelligent he found her. It started that way, the gifts he gave her increasing in meaning and values changing in decimals, and by then, double digits from where she started. And it wasn’t punitive yet because it worked. She did focus more on improving the grades when she had someone actively caring about their improvement. 

It was the math test pinned with a magnet onto the refrigerator that she never had. 

But her GPA hadn’t gone down at all since this started, it only showed steady improvement across the board, but that was not the case this semester. She had gotten a bad case of strep the week of midterms and those exams certainly reflected it. 

It was mortifying to be brought down by her body, which was how she supported herself, that one week of it out of commission tanked her semester. 

And the worst part was she didn’t fail the term. She’d just scraped by in blissful mediocrity she would have been grateful for. Before him. 

She shouldn’t resent him for it but she did.

Two years ago she’d have laughed it off and been glad to just accept the university credits, even tarnished in underperformance. Now she didn’t fail and she was still humiliated. 

She still wasn’t over the embarrassment from a week ago when she mentioned her Pre-Thanksgiving illness to a professor and the bastard chuckled and said  _ “well, that explains it.” _

“Rey, do not stall with me.”

Her bare feet crossed the hotel carpet with clenched toes. She slid onto Kylo’s lap, balanced on a broad thigh, and brought her laptop into his line of sight like a serving tray. She trembled for a moment after realizing that she had only gotten  _ one _ aspect of this over with, the physical one: she was seated obediently on his lap but he still hadn’t processed or reacted to her grades. 

Her thumb flew up to her mouth, her nail worrying between her teeth. 

“Stop that,” he said automatically. 

Her teeth clenched together on nothing and her hand fell to her lap. 

She honestly wanted to cry. With a twitch like prey checking to see what was lurking behind it, she turned over her shoulder and considered his somber expression, his brows furrowed in concentration. 

His possessive hand on her hip didn’t so much as move. 

“Not bad,” he said finally, pressing a kiss to her cheek, “I’m very proud of you, Rey. This was a difficult semester and I know you tried your hardest. You didn’t give up.”

A hiccup squeaked out of her throat. Her hands fisted in the skirt of the dress he bought her to celebrate the end of the semester. It was lovely, nothing she’d pick for herself, a creamy velvet that had a blue sheen to it in the places the material sinewed into a curve, it made her look like the kind of adult she clearly wasn’t. 

She’d felt like crying since she put it on to meet him. Pretending. 

He fumbled with the laptop to sit safely on the table beside them. 

“What’s wrong?”

There was a sudden concern in his voice as hot tears leaked down her face. 

“I didn’t do well.”

His large hand started circling the curve of her hip. 

“You were sick, baby. It’s not your fault.”

Kylo always spoke simply. To be honest, she’d expected such a pervert to be more vocal about it.  _ Pervert _ wasn’t particularly kind. Or accurate. She’d just never known someone who took sex so seriously. 

He was the dominant one, the experienced one, and it was weird how he managed that in so few words. 

Of course he knew about her illness. He’d given her some line about not contaminating her living space, like a control freak, and got her a room in a hotel close to campus where he even hired a nurse to check in on her until she was well. When she had to cancel on him one night when she initially got sick, he had wanted to know why. The reason she gave, the honest one, locked him into a rather insistent presence throughout until she was well again. 

It had helped, to be fair, being able to study in pillowed, luxurious misery and then limp over to the exam room within a ten minute’s walk from the plush room he got her. Then easily falling into that soft bed when the tests she’d clearly failed were through. 

“Did you think I wouldn’t take that into account?” he purred in her ear as they looked at the screen together.

She had sort of assumed he would ignore it. Mercy. He was a pretty ruthless person, so him making allowances for something so pathetic as human error didn’t seem like a move he’d consider. 

He did show up the night midterms were over. Even though he was free, and she was a mess of used tissues and leaking from every orifice on her face, he didn’t take her word for it that cancelling was in his best interest and he came by to see her. 

She hadn’t expected the knock on the door that night. She’d been crying so hard, her throat raw from her cold and from screaming her frustration in her pillow, she almost waited for it to go away. But Kylo had sent a few things to the room the course of the week that had made it easier, at least on her illness, that she no longer ignored the knocks. It had to be some kind of delivery. 

She’d try anything at this point to make herself feel better.

Sniffling, wiping her runny nose with the back of her fist, Rey had padded to the door and swung it open.

He was there with a sad smile and a bottle of champagne.

“I can’t—we shouldn’t—” she tried to swallow but she couldn’t. “I cancelled this week because I wouldn't be up for it tonight.”

His brow furrowed. He didn’t move from the doorway.

“I’m not here to do that. I just came by to see how things went.”

“Oh.”

She stepped back into the massive suite that he paid for. Bolstered by meds he had delivered to her. Fed from his help. She  _ had _ to let him in, didn’t she? She sloppily wiped the tears from her eyes and stepped to make way for him. 

Kylo went to the bar and carefully placed down the fancy champagne. From another bag in his hand, he extracted a gallon of orange juice, which tempted her more than the champagne. 

She glanced at the clock. Maybe she’d never imagined it was him at the door because he was on time tonight. 

“How did your exams go?”

“Awful,” she admitted, the heel of her hand coming up to cover one teary eye. “Really bad.”

She can’t even mask the disappointment in her voice.

He was quiet for a moment. Considering her.

“I’m impressed you even got yourself out of bed.”

He splashed the sparest hint of champagne into some fresh-squeezed orange juice for her, called it a mimosa, and toasted her efforts on her exams. She hadn’t felt like celebrating. But commiserating, feeling sticky and sore in her pajamas, was less of a struggle when she wasn’t alone. 

It was the most spoiled she had ever felt by him. Sniffling and sipping a drink she couldn’t even taste.

“It’s over,” he said quietly, his voice low and soothing, as she weakly took a sip down her sore throat, “you don’t have to worry about it anymore.”

She felt absolved. At least for a night.

He left without touching her once. But the cracked-open feeling of agony and loathing had gone away, the rope slipped through her hands, like he sent it out to drift on the tide. With a warm feeling from the champagne and a clean feeling from the citrus, she fell asleep easily in the bed he paid for. Not even to share.

She felt weird about his presence, in his wake. Not a bad weird. Not a good weird. She wasn’t sure how to handle him without crisp, delicate negotiation or brutal sex. She didn’t know how she felt about it when he did just show up when she needed him. Even though this was part of it. The taking care. 

She had never asked for it from him before. 

Maybe she was the weird one. She held herself so awkwardly until he left. Like she had never learned not to have sex with him.

Now, looking over those disappointed grades with him, there was a nudge against her ass as she basked in his praise, but it wasn’t an imposing presence. It was strange how his clothed erection could still steal her breath away with excitement, just a little, more than the sight of it bare, falling free from the zipper. She reached down and stroked her knuckles along the length of him tucked against one strong thigh, over his trousers.

That cock was so good. She felt a little shy of it, a little crazy for it. It was thick and heavy and alive somehow, a different animal to the rest of his body. She savored little moments alone with it. Without all the other pieces of him that were so complicated. 

_ “Be my good girl,” _ he breathed into her hair. 

He kept his lips on her skin, moving slowly down her throat as she squirmed on his lap. Cupping him possessively and feeling his flesh jerk towards her. Dryness invaded her mouth as she played with his hardness, so much so she whimpered when he drew her hand away and then cupped her jaw to pull her tighter against him.

“Daddy, please—”

His lips silenced hers for an instant. She was still dizzy with the denial and the want when he brushed his lips along her jaw. 

“Studying so hard, while you were so sick—”

He lifted her under the knees to cradle her across his lap, instead of perching on it like his good girl. He was actually holding her. 

“—now that deserves a big reward, don’t you think?”

* * *

The stars weren’t out tonight, but it looks like every single one was taken from the night sky and crammed onto that gold engagement ring in his hand. 

_“What?”_

She blinks a few times. Of all the things she was expecting to come from this trip: it was never this. 

He’s still kneeling on the ground. On the stone patio that  _ can’t be good for his knees, _ or his circulation. She tried to picture a single human heart in that body and the exhaustion it must feel, sometimes grasping for the image to transplant the heart of a lion or a horse to properly circulate for him. 

“Please come up here,” she whispers instead of answering, feeling like she had just taken a rock to a dream and smashed it. 

His eyes widen for a moment, and in a silence as cold as a blade, he slides back into his seat. The jewelry box rests, still open, on the table between them. She stares at it, expecting a ring of fangs, a snapping jaw, to close around her hand.

“We need to talk about this,” she adds, with a seriousness in her tone that meant her answer was longer than  _ no. _

She sees the hunger light again in his eyes when he senses that too.

He can work with that. Kylo is a vocal negotiator. There’s almost a pleasure in his eyes when he sees that he may have to fight her for it.

When Rey observed that he was quiet, it was when talking was unnecessary for function but perhaps polite to still provide anyway. He was quiet for that personal filler that let her know his mind in its simplest stage: comments on the food he was eating, appreciation of the room they were in, even innocuous annoyance about the traffic that had made him late. These were all things he didn’t share with her. 

His skill in business was in how smoothly and fully he could speak when necessary. She had seen that side of him when he was on phone calls, or when they put this whole contract to paper two years ago. That was a different man who rarely handled her.

When he was vulnerable, as he was with her, he was quiet. 

That’s much easier to withstand than the talking. Persuasive speech is an art to him.

She clears her throat.

“I haven’t even seen your house.”

While it feels like a lame excuse, and it’s not everything, it’s a place to start. 

Kylo pauses at this and manages a chuckle.

“No, you haven’t.”

“That’s usually part of the process of deciding to get married. I haven’t seen your home, met your family—”

“You will,” he answers with confidence, “obviously.”

This is a lot for him to suddenly be comfortable with.

She hadn’t thought things would get more personal in a charade. It burns at her, to picture herself the hired wife that an agency paired him with. Christmases smiling woodenly while his family pretended she was a beloved wife. Cutting birthday cakes for their children who might never know the truth of how their parents met. Growing old next to a man who liked his hands around her throat and her body fucked every which way that popped into his head.

She flips through thousands of future planner pages in her mind: 

**Kylo’s High School Reunion. Fucked in front of a girl that rejected him for prom.**

**Baby Teething. Nipple Cream. Handjob After Kylo Took the Night Feeding.**

**20th Anniversary. Hog-Tied. Hitachi. Throatfuck.**

Yes, it was unrealistic to expect to be offered any future in this, but that didn’t mean to jump on a future just because it was offered. 

“I mean...it’s a job.”

His eyes narrow at her. 

“It’s a working relationship.”

A humorless snort falls from her lips.

“Is that what you think?”

His mouth hangs open for a moment, lips pursing as he assesses her. She swallows.

“Tell me, as you’ve grown in seniority in your agency, have they sent you new potential clients?”

She pales and looks down at her plate. There were—occasionally—profiles of other possible matches sent her way to see if she showed any interest. 

_ In case you get bored, _ Maz always said. Her mocking tone about Rey being a new girl after two years, sticking with her first match all this time, was always an implication that this was out of the ordinary.  _ We would love to see you find where you most belong. _

But that didn’t mean she wanted him to know about the offers. And how she never took these offers. Courting a potential sugar daddy was a private matter.

“And as our terms were renegotiated so frequently—so you could feel more secure, more  _ rewarded— _ you didn’t think that had anything to do with maintaining exclusivity with you and how much I valued it?”

His hand curls around hers again as she remains silent. It seems so  _ heavy. _

“It was always going to be that way with us. If you tried to leave me for a better offer, I would counteroffer.”

Like it’s the simplest thing in the world to get what he wanted. 

“It’s easy for you,” she murmurs. 

“How so?”

And that’s when she breaks a huge personal rule. This isn’t about how she  _ feels. _

“We’d had this worked out to a few nights a week where I would accommodate your...tastes. What you’re asking from me is sex...how  _ you _ like it,” she clears her throat, “now whenever you want.”

His hand leaves hers.

Kylo sits up, his eyes flashing, for the first time indicating that Rey has gotten something deeply wrong. She’s grown used to his intimidating demeanor, even at his most relaxed state. She’s even imagined the fearsome sight he must be in anyone who displeases him: personally and professionally, as she exists in the eclipse of both to him. From all the straight spines and respectful distances kept up even at the rowdiest of wedding receptions, it’s clear that everyone in his life has a healthy fear of him. But she has only been able to fill in the gaps with her own imagination for  _ how _ he must be a sight to behold in conflict. Until now. 

His intensity is harrowing and she’s stunned to have it turned on her this way. 

“It’s not an acquisition for just my pleasure,” he lowers his voice, which is odd for him given his usual frankness about sex, “you like what I do to you.”

If she didn’t know any better she would perceive  _ hurt _ in his tone.

He wouldn’t have kept her so long if she were lying about that. There was no denying it. In fact, until this point, Rey wouldn’t even say there was anything lacking in what went on between them.

_ Except… _

“I do,” she says, as if that makes her even more miserable, and tucks her arms to her chest “but that’s not all I like.”

He keeps his eyes steady on her. He seems intent to have this conversation, assuage any fear, but to acknowledge this will pull the lid off the whole relationship and how it worked. 

She’s not sure she’s ready for that to happen. 

“What can we introduce into our sexual encounters for you to feel entirely fulfilled? Obviously, I would usually plan for myself topping in most situations. I didn’t want to burden you with the responsibility interfering with your classwork, but if you would like to explore dominating me I’d be open—”

“—Kylo—

_ “This is about what  _ we _ want.” _

He seems a little shaken up. More than she’s ever seen him. Reaching for solutions.

And they sound good.

She lets out a deep breath. Something in her chest stretches thin, how almost-but-not right it’s always been, and makes her feel all the more pathetic.

“I don’t want a—” her hands shake and she sets her napkin down to the side and glares at him, “I don’t want a fucking  _ scene _ every time we have sex.”

He blinks at her. If her comment was sloppy, she wouldn’t entirely deny that she’d also meant it to offend. Just to press him back from this topic. But she can already tell he senses this. 

“What do you mean?”

Her mouth turns to a sour shape. 

“Say I fail a test. I want to come home and have my husband rub my back, maybe eat me out, and let me choose what to order for dinner. Comfort. I don’t want it turned into an elaborate, calculated scenario about submission and the delicate balance of power between someone like you and...someone like me. I don’t want this full-time. I don’t want to live in it.”

At this his gaze darkens. He drums his fingers on the table.

“Do you think I would try to slip a full-time submissive role in the fine print of a marriage proposal?” he slows her breath with a look, “My requirements for you to fulfill a sexual fantasy of mine have been three evenings a week, it would hardly overwhelm your schedule as badly as it’s doing now.”

Her tone is immediately indignant, rushed:

“So we have sex three nights a week? Is that outlined in the prenup?”

She doesn’t know why that bothers her more than the full-time submissive idea, but it feels like an incredibly wasteful acquisition if he’s only making use of it for the time he’d already been given.

There’s a slow breath out of his nose that makes her spine go completely straight in her chair. She’s really teased the bull this time.

His hands shift, fingers dancing out their tension over the table in a crawl that goes nowhere. He takes another deep breath, this time inwards, to settle himself. 

“This previous scenario you mentioned, as impossible as it would be for you in sound mind and body to  _ fail a test, _ this is what you are seeking in a partner?”

Rey blinks at him. 

_ He remembered when she was sick.  _

“Maybe.”

He keeps his eyes on hers and she can’t, no matter how much she wants to petulantly slide them another direction, take them off of him.

“Emotional support, reassurance, and loving sex?”

He’s listing these things like terms and conditions and it almost makes her laugh in disbelief that he is _ offering. _

“That’s what everyone wants, possibly the bare minimum of what everyone wants.”

He ignores her sullen tone.

“You would like me to be more adaptable to your emotional needs,” he runs his fingers through his hair. For a man who couldn’t blush, that is the action that has replaced it. It is a very rare sight so it does not go unnoticed, an essential piece of the puzzle and too glaring a signal to ignore. She stares at him, wavering in front of her, “you would like for me to be more tender with you when you are feeling vulnerable. I have tried to foster honesty between us...I see now that when I have tried to adapt to fit your mood, it has gone unnoticed.”

She can’t move. 

She wasn’t aware he knew that she had moods. 

“It is a single facet of you,” he continues slowly, so she understands, “and there are equally as many facets of me.”

It seems impossible that the days she showed up cranky, or tired, or sad, that he pulled up short of his plans and changed directions to accommodate. But it made a strange amount of sense when she tried to think of any time when he selfishly steered her away from how she really felt into some way how he wanted her and couldn’t name a single one. The closest was...when she was sick, and she failed a test, and he made her a cocktail of much-needed Vitamin C and a little champagne and tried to cheer her up. 

Maybe that’s why this was so satisfying all along. There was perception in his actions. And he didn’t see her as cranky or tired or sad because...she had been excited. 

There was the painfully, glaringly obvious: Kylo made her wait and she still didn’t hate him. She should hate him for every moment. But she was there every week, thinking about hating him, and came to the conclusion that she couldn’t do it.

But his own side of things was always food for her curiosity. A deeply craved one: savory and with the right crunchy texture for agitated teeth. Rey hadn’t anticipated ever receiving an answer. She just wanted one of her own to chew on when she got bored. 

Now it was placed in her lap. His thoughts about this somehow involved marriage, and that made him even more mysterious.

It is terrifying to think all of this was about pleasing him when he’d really been one to observe her, as well, all along. And come to this conclusion.

“I have moods,” he says darkly, “as evidenced by our arrangement. In our current relationship, my satisfaction hinges on having you in a certain way those three nights a week. I have a feeling that the—desperation—would be better under control by keeping you close.”

She tries to contain her trembling body but the way he looks at her as he continues speaking just plucks her hard so she starts vibrating all over again.

He lowers his voice:

“And in regards to  _ how _ you’d like it; I am more than willing to explore all that you like. Do not mistake the difference in my previous tastes for disinterest in yours.”

Her temper rises higher the more reasonable Kylo tries to sound. 

“You don’t even know my tastes!”

He purses his lips. He’s confused but he seems to want to tangle himself up in the confusion, immerse himself in the mess, instead of merely taping it up to cover the broken pieces. 

“I have come to know you as guarded. This is a commonality between us, because of the vulnerability—we both— _ the demands of arrangements of this nature.  _ I didn’t want to seem invasive. And I had hoped, over time, your desires would be shared with me. That you would be comfortable with me, to share them.”

He glances away from her eyes for the first time.

What rumbles out of his chest is the closest she’s ever heard him come to shame:

“And I would like if you told me what I was doing wrong.”

All the air leaves her lungs.

_ “Nothing.” _

It makes him lift his eyes, though his chin is still bowed apologetically. His shocked expression and the truth of her statement do not make her any less frustrated. Now that this is clarified, Rey wets her lips and continues, “I haven’t  _ disliked _ anything. There’s just a side to normal sexuality we haven’t even explored.”

She tried to picture it with him. Quickies in the bathroom with steam on the mirror. Pulling down sweatpants on a lazy Sunday. Angry, angry,  _ angry _ sex where he’d kept her waiting because of traffic and she could just rage at him because she’d done so much waiting.

Angry sex for anger that would be forgiven.

She’d tear into him. She’d scream into his neck and claw his back and just beg his body to be relentless inside hers, something that would never leave her, something that wouldn’t let her doubt for a moment—

“I’m willing to offer ample time for us to find out. You have total freedom and acceptance. I could be tender with you,” his hand twitches, “it’s something I’ve given a great deal of thought. I refrained because there was always a fear in how you would respond to me. But now that I know you are—responsive to it. This is something I would not perform out of obligation. I would perform it from a—deeply—enthusiastic place.”

It’s hard to hear anything over her heartbeat. But there’s still an odd feeling that stops her from begging him to keep saying those things. 

“We can’t just product test my feelings.”

His brow furrows. 

“What do you mean?”

She flippantly waves her hand between them.

“I’m not just—be happy—be sad— _ ‘now let’s see how we deal with Rey when she’s angry,’ _ ” she grits her jaw in resentment as she shrugs like it’s all no big deal to him.

His eyes are calm when they consider her. 

“How do you feel right now?”

_ “Fucking frustrated,”  _ she rests on her elbows on the table and lets her shoulders hunch forward limply. There’s a half-laugh to herself at admitting the obvious.

He clears his throat and gets out of his chair. 

“Well, let’s start there.”

She sits up in surprise, and he’s already standing beside her and offering her his hand. 

There’s no push to feel any other way than she does right now. He’s just letting it rest organically between them: a silent response to her comment about testing feelings that were artificial for the sake of being tested. Kylo’s taking what she’s honestly offering. She can sort of tell in the wild way his body is moving through its own stillness: muscles tensing, balance shifting, this incredible energy being held at bay. All while remaining perfect still.

He never felt like something she could touch, across the table from her. He’s something she waits for and wants, but distant, constant and faraway like the moon and the sun. 

Through all that observation it takes a moment for her to realize she hasn’t taken his hand yet.

Now he’s reaching for her. Waiting for her to touch him. It’s strange how she’s had sex with him hundreds of times in a myriad of ways, each their own constellations of hands and lips and bodies forming a sequence of stars. But now his skin seems hot enough to burn her, makes her shy to touch it, curious about how it will  _ feel. _

“Please,” he adds quietly, but she’s just staring at his outstretched fingers. 

* * *

She had snorted when a millionaire asked her to meet him so they could  _ watch a movie. _ As if he needed to meet her under the pretense of ‘Netflix and Chill’ for their first date since the contract between them was signed. 

She was more surprised that when the address he requested to meet was a movie theater. It was deceptively normal. She had to take a minute to breathe in her car because she wasn’t sure she could do this without a bed. That was a lot to ask for the first time they had sex. 

And there were little curlicues of shivers throughout her body when she thought about having sex with him. She wasn’t sure why, seeing it laid out of paper, it was she was so surprised what she was cool with. She didn’t take an optimistic approach to filling out the extensive laundry list of kinks provided to her, she figured they could reevaluate at a time where she’d had more experience to consider herself game for anything. But she still found herself accepting, when she closed her eyes and cleared her mind, to most of the things he outlined. 

It made her too imaginative for her own good. Sitting here with just thoughts was going to go South. With a swallow, she plucked up her courage and walked into the theater. 

Rey was five minutes late.

He was standing idle at the ticket office in a dark suit that at least didn’t make her feel overdressed. He didn’t flinch in surprise or wave when she arrived: his brows raised and his head tilted back as if now that she graced his sight, he would  _ look _ at her, and the image changed the weight of his skull. She shivered as she approached him, hoping for some guidance that would fold her into a hug or a kiss or a handshake. Whichever. 

He kissed her cheek, warmly, and took her hand. 

“I thought we’d do this properly. I’d be proud to bring you along as my date in the future, when I need one, I don’t want it to be foreign between us.”

He’d said as much before: but that didn’t feel like what he’d dedicate the time he was paying to for very often. And this wasn’t even to show off for friends or family, someday, if he’d wanted arm candy. This was a public place with strangers, many of which were eying him from the cut of his clothes to the way he carried himself. The man she was with was  _ impressing _ the people around her. As cute as some of the people she’d dated were, she’d never had someone so coveted be  _ with _ her.

The feeling of being looked at revived her panic from the car.

“This isn’t—” curiosity made the words slide out from under her, an avalanche of suppressed curiosity tumbling along her low tone, “—the movie theater isn’t a sex thing?”

She had warily imagined a massive, privately rented-out space for hardcore porn, or worse, he wanted to be in public with her as they watched it. But nothing no the Marquee indicated that was in the cards.

He looked at her questioningly, his hand warm and solid in hers. 

“No. I hope that doesn’t disappoint you too much. There was a documentary opening this weekend I’d been meaning to see, and if I don’t go somewhere and sit in the dark to watch a movie, I’ll just be answering emails and taking calls through the whole thing.  _ You _ are here to keep me on my best behavior.”

She actually laughed as he led her to the concessions stand, where he did the unthinkable and stood in line. That just felt too human.

“No bribing your way to the front?”

“Like I said,” he tilted his chin down and smirked at her, “best behavior.”

It was strange how one’s mind could wander during three hours of WWII archival footage. But Rey’s mind traversed the entire galaxy while she waited for it to finish up. She didn’t want to be rude, if this is what Kylo wanted and he seemed to be enjoying himself next to her, but she couldn’t help but question if this was a massive waste of time he was paying for. 

She smoothed her hands over the skirt of the slip dress that had been given to her, along with a few other items she was too scared to closely examine the labels of, to wear tonight. It did seem like an odd choice for watching a movie together, but in waves Rey became aware that there was some thought put into it on his part. It fit loosely when she sat down, falling gently over her body, instead of pinching with waistbands or hefting support structures to weigh on her lungs as she tried to be comfortable in her seat. It was as soft as a sigh and fell just as gently.

It was also a shiny yellow silk that looked like honey dripping through a beam of sunshine, so the oozy sensuality of the garment was honestly making her feel a little warm when she was so close to the dark, structured clothes he swathed himself in. She glanced at him, focused in the darkness next to her. 

The rattle of plane propellers over the speakers set her teeth on edge. When was this going to end? When were they going to get to the sex part? Why was she the only one wanting it?

She hadn’t realized she had fully turned in her seat to observe his profile until he placed his hand on her thigh. 

_ Fuck.  _ He was huge. With such a little piece of him touching her, the hand draped over her knee, it could really be brought to the scale of her body. It was intimidating. The touch was comforting, heavy and warm, but also not limber and alert, not searching. It didn’t seem to initiate anything. He seemed so calm and peaceful next to her: her body was practically vibrating with a consuming blend of boredom and lust. His hand was on her knee but otherwise all of his attention was on the screen. 

Rey was no stranger to mindless work, and had fully prepared herself to tune out some obnoxious guy if she ever got this far into this bad idea. She could tune nearly anything out. And yet this man next to her was so massive that he could not be ignored, with the gravitational pull of an entire planet, and he was ignoring her for a movie. 

She focused on the spot his hand rested. Condensing her spirit down to lie under the warmth of his skin. Her muscles flexed under the massive palm on her thigh. Not trying to be obvious, but hoping to remind him that he was touching her. 

On her honey-dress, she wanted to climb in his lap and drip down his thigh. And he was somehow entirely ignorant of this.

Of course, as if the experience could be stretched out any longer, he stayed through the credits. Names of what Rey assumed were very hardworking people fuzzed out of her line of vision in a haze. 

_ When was he going to really touch her? He paid for touching.  _

_ What was she even for, if he was here for this? _

A low sound hummed in the depths of his chest as the credits froze on their final frame and the last wisps of audio vanished, plunging them back into the real world. 

Rey sat perfectly still in her seat. 

_ Now what? _

Was he going to take her to help him give his cat medicine next? Did he have some heavy boxes he needed help moving? Was she going to drive him to the airport?

“A lot to think about,” he said ponderously, strangely still beside her.

_ “Yes, exactly” _ she agreed, her tone not matching her enthusiastic answer in any capacity. But she was here to play along.

He turned to look at her for the first time since sitting down.

“Did you have sufficient time to think about what  _ you _ want?”

His voice was the same silk of her dress. Rey shivered next to him, spending three hours wanting his eyes on her, and suddenly couldn’t look at them when they were. 

A slight glance up gave her the sight of his twisted smirk. She almost fell back in her seat. He had been  _ enjoying _ her frustration?

_ “Is this a sadist thing?” _ she hissed, her cheeks rising in color of a very daunted flush. “Making me sit here?”

She felt like she could handle pain more than waiting.

He shook his head. 

“I’m not a sadist. I’m dominant, but I didn’t intend to torture you today.”

If anything her face got redder.  _ Oh. He’d really liked the movie. _

He was  _ paying her _ to have a good time. She was just surprised that a good time didn’t mean constant blowjobs if he felt like it. This was going badly, but in the frantic, sand running out of an hourglass way that she wanted it to go better instead of end.

“I enjoyed having the company,” he added, standing up and offering her a hand to get to her feet. “We don’t have to do this again if you don’t like it.”

She didn’t drop his hand or step with him when he started to pull away to exit the theater. 

“I’m sorry,” she squeezed his fingers tighter when he looked away. With her urging, his warm eyes came back to her. They had such an interesting, smoky texture to the irises. “I’m a terrible date.”

“Not at all,” and in the solitude of the now-empty theater (though there had to be under ten people in their screening when the movie was playing) he slid his hands possessively to her hips, “it seemed like you had a lot on your mind.”

This moment is what set the tone: he kissed her. He didn’t do a precursory check before touching her like it was a real first date. He bowed and kissed her because that seemed to be what he wanted to do with their time together. The confidence was not of a player, or a Casanova, or a guy so in love he had written his own story about what this moment really was in his head. It just made him seem like a man. Kylo _ could _ kiss her, could have forgone bringing her here first and tossed her unceremoniously in his bed, whenever he felt like it. There was deliberation, but also less artifice to it than one would expect. 

It was a nice kiss. 

In the crowded theater lobby, he brought his lips to her ear: “Tell me what you were thinking about.”

She could do that.

“Your hand.”

She realized a little fuzzily that maybe he knew she was bored, and gave her something to play with. 

“Usually women are intimidated by the size of me,” his hands curled around her elbows, holding her steady, “I didn’t frighten you?”

How could they be when his hands were so soft?

“Not at all.”

“Do you want—?”

His phone rang. 

He sprang back with a dark expression. Rey immediately felt so cold, her chest constricting, as he checked the screen and cursed. 

“Give me one second,” he kept his tone courteous, which it was decidedly not so just a moment ago. He answered the call like he wanted to kill who was on the line.

“I—” his expression darkened, when he was cut off before speaking,  _ “I’ll handle it.” _

He bit his lip as he hung up, Rey feeling like a flame that was snuffed out, choking on her own smoke. He brought her to his body with an arm around her shoulders. 

“I have to pick something up from my office,” but he wasn’t moving yet, “would you come with me? It’ll only be a moment.”

She probably shouldn’t: but she found herself nodding. 

By the time that movie had finished it was late enough that nobody was around in the office building he brought her too. It was a long elevator ride up, especially in the dress he’d given her. 

She raised her eyebrows when she saw the stack of papers waiting on his desk. Because they were simply moving through the space towards collecting these files: she hadn’t really noted much about her surroundings. It felt as personal to him as nudity, she didn’t know if her eyes could linger on the sparse, dark office if it was private to him. But he settled in front of the high stack of papers and picked through a few pages, speed-reading, so she settled in by turning on the lamp at the edge of the desk. 

He had this power-stance, shoulders back and chest open, as he stood looking over the forms. A flicker of realization softened the stressed furrow of her brow.

Maybe she should have been flirtier in the theater, and he would have taken his chance, was this about needing the encouragement?

“These couldn’t be emailed?” she teased, leaning on her elbows kitty-cornered to his body on the desk. “Or would that defeat the purpose of bringing me to your big, fancy office?”

He glanced at her. 

“Ideally. The firm that sent them is very traditional. Some would say inefficient. Waiting for someone to scan them for me would be time we don’t have.”

She went limp with disappointment. There went that theory. 

He was completely focused as he read, his nostrils flaring, but the way he ran his fingertip across his tongue to wet it just to turn another page had her staring rapt at him in the lamplight. 

“You  _ don’t _ want to play around on your big, fancy desk?”

His eyes shot up to her. He set the pages he was holding down. 

“I never said that.”

She didn’t realize that his attention was a resource she wanted. She’d had his money even while he was busy here. Just like she’d had it during the movie. 

Something about that just wasn’t enough.

She bent further over the desk. 

“I couldn’t get them all scanned and uploaded in time, Sir,” she blinked up at him guiltily, with her cheek resting on his desk, drawing up the skirt of her dress. “I’m so sorry.”

Maybe he had wanted her to offer herself. Back at the theater he seemed to want her to invite him into her mind. 

He rested back on his heels to appraise the sight of her folded over his desk. 

“No,” he whispered dryly. 

Rey pushed herself off of the desk with a tight breath, ready to walk out the door. He caught her gently by the arm and pulled her to him. 

“Not like that,” he clarified in a whisper, his hands at the straps of her dress, lifting them off her skin. “Take this off. Sit in my chair.”

She could follow those directions. This was about how he wanted it. And this made more sense than sitting in a stuffy theater for three hours. 

She shimmied out of the straps and let the dress fall around her feet. His chair was massive and just having the wingback of it against her skin, hearing the creak of it when she leaned back, was a lot of power she was surprised to immediately have.

It didn’t feel like the first time she was bare for him. It felt like she was exactly where she was supposed to be, bare for him.

“Knees up,” he ordered, seemingly hypnotized as he walked over to her, a trance-like stare locked on her bare body. A shiver moved through her, tilting her head at him to try and puzzle him out. This was weird in all the ways she hadn’t expected. This was perhaps the most expected part and she had no clue what he would do next. She brought her feet up to the edge of the seat while he crouched before it. With a glance up at her, he tangled his fingers in the undergarments covering her hips and slid them down like mere candy wrappers. Trash to be flung aside. 

He kissed her inner thigh, then gently pulled the supple skin between his teeth. Not painfully, but enough for the flesh to feel  _ sharp _ and  _ hard _ caress either side from his bite.

His phone rang again. 

They both felt it this time: an immediate deflation. Rey was surprisingly ready, all cozy in his chair, this was certainly better than pretending to like some boring thrusting for someone who didn’t care at all about impressing her. 

He answered the call, and she shrank back, a little stunned. She tried to close her legs around his head, and though he leaned back from between her thighs, he held them open. He kept his hands on her legs like he was calming a frightened animal. 

“Ren.”

She could not tell at all who he was talking to on the other line. There was no softening in his tone for a coworker that was his equal. There was no assumed formality for someone higher up. But there also wasn’t the disinterest of someone beneath him.

“It’s been delivered,” he kept his eyes on her pussy. This made her squirm. Despite what he was paying her for, this was a lot for Rey. “I’ll comb through it and have my notes ready by morning.”

Whatever answer he was given didn’t seem to matter: he bowed his head forward in his silence and instead pointedly inhaled her musk. Closing his eyes as her scent hit him. 

This should have been repellent or at least made her self-conscious, but seeing his throat chord and his nostrils flare at the smell of her cunt made her feel claimed. 

Rey was getting wet all over his nice leather chair. Mortification could have the chance to linger if his tongue didn’t slither out just then for a taste: all the while still listening to whoever was on the phone. 

The only sound was the faint, tinny reverberations of some stranger's voice at her thigh, not even loud enough to form words when their echo hit her ears. Her whole body was locked in tight tremors as he lapped at her folds.

She almost wailed when he lifted his mouth from her. 

“I’ve been kept waiting far too long,” he said to whoever was on the line: but it might as well have been a declaration to the whole world. “They can wait until morning.”

A lot of worry had been put towards how to fake it with a guy who wanted it fake but also real. This was put to rest almost immediately when he hung up the phone and pounced on her cunt. He brought the whole chair forward with his hands around her hips and she cried out, muscles of her thighs tightening around his shoulders, those massive hands wrapped around her twisting legs. It took seconds to finish her off, almost before she knew she’d started. 

It wouldn’t be a lie. He’d make sure of it.

_ Oh, good to know, _ she thought to herself at the thunderous pressure of his mouth,  _ he’s greedy. _

He rested his head to her bare stomach. His brow settled against the soft flesh, hair tickling her skin, and he seemed more winded from the oral than she did. If he was so good at it, it might just take a lot out of a person. She touched his hair in this weird moment of vulnerability. He’d managed to make her cum  _ embarrassingly _ easy. This evening not going quite how either of them had planned. They rested in the silence of compromise, not knowing if what they went without had made sense. The offer of money for companionship. The offer of sex for money. Now having both. It was like a mental receipt grinding from the spool, long and unwieldy with too much written in fine print, like what Rey stuffed in her purse without reading whenever she picked up her birth control from CVS. 

“Next time, we can just find a hotel,” she said breathlessly, feeling a little embarrassed that he had to sit in this exact chair in the morning.

Or proud.

He blinked up at her, his pupils heavy and dark, a sharp contrast to the delicate fluttering of his eyelids. 

“You’re right,” he said after a moment, nodding up at her. “You’re right. That would be more appropriate. Next time.”

* * *

They have to sleep in the same bed anyway, so they end up in the bedroom when she takes his hand. Their bodies drift around the room when he lets her go. They’re both there: if unsure. 

Rey tries to gather herself up at the edge of the bed. There’s a sense to just sink backwards onto the mattress and nap off the journey they’d just been at back at the table. But she’s not sure if sliding back onto the sheets seems like seeking a simple solution. 

The stone walls around her intimidate her: they’re not in a room, they’re in a castle, and she can’t ignore that with the carved structure of the ceiling. Especially now that shadow exaggerates them more and more.

He keeps turning off lights: an orbit to her along the windows and walls of the room with her at the bed’s core. They’re almost in total darkness, save for the lanterns outside over the lake through the large windows. 

“You can swim tomorrow,” he says gently, snapping the switch of a lamp in the corner. The darkness feels physical as it fills this room. Like a wave that laps against her when it falls. 

There’s something to the casual suggestion. A guidance, maybe. An offer.

She swallows. 

“I don’t know how.”

His mouth is grim in the dim light. It stings. That something personal was offered, a line they never crossed, and she feels like it could now fail.  _ Wasn’t that the mood of the entire evening. _

“You don’t?”

“I never learned.”

He steps over to her. It has been clear he’s trying to give her space: with no answer between them she feels like her own person, if distressed, so the decision feels like playing with a knife. Private. Only capable of hurting herself. 

There’s a weird cast over everything: now that she knows it was planned as a proposal. He really knocked it out of the park. Private, sensual, quiet. She’s impressed by every detail, except for maybe the fact that he did it for  _ her. _ Maybe if she was a little more breathless...a little more in love...this would have been the most beautiful thing that ever happened to her.

Her throat squeezes because it is, distantly, still very nice. 

She’s wary when he approaches her. It’s strange holding herself still for someone’s plan of attack. 

“The lake is very shallow, if you’d like to learn.”

His hands settle on her hips with a sureness in the weight of them. Her head lulls to the side because his touch shouldn’t feel good when she’s so confused. Why did it have to change from this?

_ Probably because he didn’t want to grow old having to hire a woman to spend time with him. _ Her heart cracks open just a fraction for him. He hadn’t wanted exclusivity. He’d wanted monogamy.

“The water is warm. It’s very clean. I’d be with you.”

Simple promises. Very innocuous ones, used to coax her. Yet it makes her want to cling to him. She still doesn't know what to say.

“We can do whatever you want while we’re here.”

Those hands keep moving up and down her back.

“What do you want?” he asks against the crown of her skull. 

That’s too huge a question. It feels like there’s no answer. 

When she’d stumbled upon this agency, up to her neck in debt and terror, she could at least comfort herself that she wasn’t so pathetic to ever need to spend her money for sex, for fake affection. 

Though over time observation, and pragmatism towards the whole arrangement, did make her stop considering herself as so much better than him. He had  _ no time.  _ None to date. None to get serious. None to keep anyone serious around for long. He’d built something really spectacular of himself and he’d made a lot of sacrifices. 

Rey knew all about sacrifices. It became a place of respect that he was really willing to do anything he could to succeed.

And that had left him lonely. It’s not like she couldn’t understand that. 

And even if she could get what he paid for wherever she wanted, she was lonely too. 

“What do you need?” he amends, and she blanches for a moment. Her heavy lids flutter over her eyes as she looks up at him. “Right now?”

_ “What?” _

“This is your bad day. You’re  _ frustrated,” _ he strokes his hands from her hips up her waist. It feels good. Too good. Her head falls back as he steps closer, standing so tightly against her that his thighs hug the outside of hers. “What do you want me to do for you?”

“Keep doing that.”

He watches her face carefully. She shuts her eyes for her own sanity. 

“Really?”

He’s so pleased by this that she may have admitted more than she knew.

_ “Yes,” _ she hisses in annoyance at this. There’s a rumbling in his chest, heavily amused, like a purr. 

Her head slides to rest under his throat as her back is loosening up in waves as his hands move across it. Where was this guy for two years? All this time taking it rough, impersonal, and suddenly he knew how to be gentle?

“You always looked at me like you were daring me to pounce on you,” he sighs into her ear. “I’m just a man, Rey.”

“And now?”

Lips trace over her cheek.

“You’re tired. And we’ve given each other a lot to think about.”

Her arms come up without her brain willing it. She holds him close.

“How am I going to be your wife?”

His lips drift over her neck. They’re both swaying a little, not dancing, but keeping a motion going so their bodies caress ever-so-slightly as they stand at the foot of the bed. Dancing around each other. She can’t hide that she wants to work her breasts against the solidness of his torso. He keeps her stimulated at those points by moving against her with the steady rocking of an old ship on the sea. 

“However you want. Renegotiating. You’ve gotten very good at getting what you need.”

Her hands fist into his hair. Her chin tilts up so she can look into his eyes.

“You say that like you know what I need.”

He doesn’t answer. He just blinks at her. There’s not a single denial that falls from his lips. 

The halter of her dress instead unties from behind her. He’s always had clever hands.

“You need to be shown all your options. Now take out your pretty cunt, I promised I’d be nice to it.”

There’s still a jolt down her spine when he says it. Her cunt, pretty as he thinks it is, is warm from the compliment and there’s obviously a part of her that wants to obey. 

She stands straight with her shoulders bare. It’s still Kylo. It is silly to think he’d suddenly be  _ shy _ with her even if he was softer.

“Do I have to?”

It’s a genuine question. Not labored, not angry, but curious. 

He steps back a pace. 

“Only if you want to,” he tangles a hand in his hair for a moment. “No. Only if it’s what you want. Otherwise we can—a backrub, more food—?”

She laughs to herself as he scrambles for her examples of a bad day. He’s trying to do this correctly.

Rey curls her torso away from his to slither the loosened straps of her dress down her shoulders. With a tilt of her hips back from where they’d been secured against him, she pushes the skirt so the whole garment flutters down around her ankles. Then she steps out of the pile, along with her shoes, to get on the bed for him.

“I’ll show you, but you  _ promised.” _

His eyes flash at the warning in her tone and he steps to the edge of the bed, between her knees. 

She steadies herself with a hand on his stomach as she sits back against the comforter. His large fingers curl around her forearm, a stable weight she can work back against if she needs to lean while she pushes her underwear down her raised hips. 

It’s a pretty standard undressing for them. But that’s not to say it’s clinically detached: they’ve just worked this out to function almost automatically. It feels much more loaded now, maybe with his attentive hands and how he watches from just above her shoulder, not like he’s stalking her from a distance to devour but more like he wants to see the clothes come off from angles she could reasonably view herself. It is closer. More dimensional. More deliberate.

She shivers when she sits back, naked, on the big bed they’re to share. 

“Talk,” she suddenly blurts out, challenging him, “like a nice man.”

His breath leaves his nose all at once. 

Rey hasn’t made a lot of demands in two years. Rescheduling on him if she wants to see a guest lecturer on campus is maybe the most explicit way she’ll push Kylo in  _ any _ direction. There are orders that come with the trade,  _ give me your cock Daddy, _ or  _ cum inside me, I want it, _ but those are about his expectations. Then she felt cloaked in his dominance. The anticipation of what he’d do next was reasonably soothing. 

There was something vulnerable in getting on her knees without being asked that meant she never felt comfortable trying. Maybe he wouldn’t like it.

Maybe she would. 

“Did you think...I didn’t want it this way too?” he begins to unbutton his shirt. She stirs, sitting up, her stomach muscles tight in her little confused inward curl, “do you think I didn’t want you to be gentle with me?”

Her mind lashes with nails scratching along his back, teeth in his shoulder, the creature she became in bed with him had a hungry mouth and claws. 

Her mouth goes dry. 

_ “Gentle?” _

He strips himself too, despite his clothes being more structured, with more to untuck and unbutton, it feels like a lot less moving parts until he’s naked and sliding his body over hers. 

“You’re just so wound up by the time I get to you.”

The accusation heats her entire body from the harsh drum of her heart in her chest.  _ Her? Wound up? _

_ He _ was the one paying  _ her— _

_ “You _ make me wound up. You like it.”

“There’s no denying that.”

He takes her chin in his hand and kisses her, softly, but it’s like shucking an oyster in the violent yet clean way he efficiently pries her mouth open. First one brutal swipe and then yielding, tender flesh. This kissing, after breaking her open, is lush and sensual and it makes her tremble. He’s opening her. She’s not sure if she likes it. Then he sucks on her tongue and it’s like making out as a teenager just for the thrill. Adults didn’t kiss like this. Like it was brushing raw nerves together just to see what felt good. 

It feels like every spasm of pulsing nerve is echoed from her body into his. Shared. 

“No hiding from me,” Kylo warns her, bowing close to press kisses across over her cheek. Her hands twist in the sheets and she realizes that she can move them, she’s not tied up, she’s just keeping them in one place because she feels like she had to. 

She doesn’t have to. They still stay fisted in the sheets.

Even then, deflection.

“You were paying for it,” she says, tucking her chin to her chest shyly. He stares down at her, squinting his eyes, worrying, assessing. Her arms do come up to cover her chest then because everything, even the air, that brushes the skin makes her jolt like electric sparks. “Why didn’t you just tell me you wanted it this way?”

He kisses her brow, then her cheeks, then her chin. 

“I think we both needed it to feel—”

He doesn’t finish what he’s saying. How it felt. 

That roughness that had been so good. 

His hands cradle her hips for a moment, then slide down her thighs, until he himself sits back on his haunches between her knees with his hands covering the knobby bones. 

She spreads them, expectant, but he nearly loses his balance. He falls forward, his hair sliding over one eye, both of them widened: because she just presented him her cunt when he had intended for her to stay still for longer. Neither expecting the same thing. 

She goes still and tenses her legs to bolster his locked arms. Their bodies settle and he just stares at her for a moment. 

His hands tighten on her legs.

“Are you angry like I am?”

Those dark eyes flicker up to hers, solid in his own confession but so scared in their brown depths that she is not the same. 

_ How can he see that? _

Her eyelids flutter in little waves of shock. Tears collect in the corners of her eyes. He’d really been saving this for a while. He’s not even inside her and he’s going to make her cry. She had not anticipated that tender, emotional sex with Kylo Ren would be so destructive. 

This is still a moment where he’s trying to prove something to her. Trying to be a good husband. She shies away from the sincerity in his voice when he asks. 

“Okay, I get it,” she lets out a little, anxious laugh, “you’re really perceptive.”

He rests his chin on her belly. 

_ “So I’m right.” _

It’s not smug but it accepts no alternatives. A hot breath releases all at once out her nose and she nods with her lips pursed in frustration. 

She wants to protest but his arms slither around her hips and when they lock into place a glorious pressure as unyielding as stone pins her to the bed. But when she touches him, she feels the difference in the softness of his body. His shoulders roll seductively under her hands. His neck is loose and relaxed. He bows his head and mouths at her hip bones as her hands wander his skin. Even in the grip that she can’t break.

When he went down on her on a night they were scheduled, she mostly held onto his hair like the safety bar of a roller coaster. It was a hold-on-for-dear-life grip, it was necessary, it gave peace of mind. But it didn’t make for this. Lazily stroking his ears as he breathed against her sex and dipped a hand down to open up her folds. Being able to note the brush of his slender temporal bone against her thigh. Enjoying him. 

He was so solid and powerful when he fucked her: and this, this is just like drizzled honey pouring down her spread thighs. 

She’s terrified to realize that he hasn’t even started on her yet. The thought of him when he will has her body jerk in his arms, anticipating ruin, but he holds her steady through it.

What comes out of her throat isn’t as high and needy as her usual sounds for him. This is a deeply resonant sound from somewhere in her chest and it just flows out from a quiet exhale that expands like the sounds of an echo filling a cave. It’s reminiscent of a well-intentioned yoga sigh, or some un-self-conscious meditation. The expansive room catches every reverberation and she blushes at the growth of her own moan because it  _ builds _ when it’s not so frantically thrown out of her chest.

And then his mouth is on her.

She can feel the amount of wetness he cleans up with his tongue, how  _ runny _ her pussy is, the way her slickness works against the rough texture of his taste buds. The flesh is soft like she can’t control it: it’s not tense with control or need but plush. It’s embarrassing how messy she is. With a tremor her thighs work to close around his head, as if casting her sex in shadow will hide her need for this. Shuttering the shades around herself.

Kylo doesn’t let her. His hands keep her open and he releases a low groan. He barely lifts his lips to speak, his head not raising an inch, so he is still partially obscured by her hips and mound. She can’t even see his mouth form the words. Just his eyes as he says:

“Imaging coming home from a bad day to  _ this.” _

Him buried in her cunt. The wicked place that purr came from. Him, this, all of him.

“Not— _ fair,” _ she wails as his tongue circles her clit. 

His finger trails along the slick pooling out of her cunt. It’s teasing some sensitive areas, even outside of her sex, but she squirms against him in protest when he brushes it to her ass.

It’s too much.

“Kylo, wait,” she warns, gripping his hair and trying to bring his touch higher.  _ “Oh.” _

Her heels dig into the mattress as she tries to buck her hips against him. He strokes the length of one shaking leg with both hands. Abandoning his search for a moment. 

“Why, what’s wrong?” he rasps into her cunt. 

She stills, the place that made her buck now untouched. It feels silly to explain that him touching a place he’d been so acquainted with gave her pause  _ here. _

His tongue dips in to taste her again, and she feels him gently prodding against her ass again. 

“We said—we weren’t going to do anything dirty,” she protests.

“This isn’t dirty, baby,” he strokes around the ring of muscle and she arches towards that touch, not his talented mouth on her pussy, “it’s your body. There’s nothing dirty about it. I can be gentle here, too.”

It wars at her in a hot flush on her cheeks and a tension at the sides of her skull: it certainly  _ feels _ naughty. To let him inside places like this when they were being soft with each other. There was a violence to their usual sex, at least a system to it, that made it almost clinical. He had access to these places when she didn’t know he’d garnered affection for her. Now he has that access with that affection plainly stretched across his face. He coos as her body when it lets him on. He plants rewarding kisses on her sex as his fingers pump into her ass. He’s everywhere, thanking her, pleasuring her. 

He keeps slipping past places she didn’t let him go: and that doesn’t have anything to do with that hole he’s playing with like he owns it.

He pulls back and pats a gentle kiss on her clit.

“Tender enough? You’ve had a long day.”

“You are such a bast _ —ard.” _

She cums with one of his fingers in her ass and his lips kissing her cunt like a very sacred place. He lets out a pleased rumble and flips her onto her knees. She whimpers as his body comes to rest over hers: his cock is as hard as steel and it bobs to brush teasingly over her skin as he crawls to meet her, pre-cum slithering along her skin as he leaks for her. 

“You and I can work out all the details on the line between vanilla and deviancy later,” he assures her, notching the head of his cock into her swollen cunt so swiftly and securely she feels like he’s fastened in her for safety. All the air leaves her lungs at his promise, “but no part of you is deviant just for being so perfect for me to touch and lick and fuck.”

All of his weight presses her down into the bed. She gasps at how she stretches around him. It’s like every nerve needs that feeling of attention in his touch, a classroom full of raised hands, and when a nerve gets attention from a slide of his gorgeous skin, she feels a million jolts of satisfaction. 

“I know it’s hard to give up these fears of what constitutes perversion,” his lips pepper very gentle kisses over her bare shoulders in contrast to how his hips are  _ hammering  _ into her relentlessly, “I think you like the feeling that it’s bad. It’s why you let me punish you.”

He’s got a lot of big words for this. What had he offered at the table? For her to have a turn with him. Topping him. Maybe not now, but she had to take her chance before this vacation was over, even if they burned the contract afterwards and never spoke again. 

Even tenderly, he is too smug. He needs to feel this.

She can’t even speak. She can just feel, and she can barely do that and still stand it. 

His thick fingers brush down between the cheeks of her ass and stroke the sensitive skin around her asshole. 

“Do you want to keep a little, naughty place, just for me?”

_ “Oh,” _ her eyes roll back as he wets his fingers with her cunt and easily slides one in that hole.  _ “Ahnnn.” _

She’s taken bigger, deeper, harder. 

But this is fucking  _ everything  _ she can take right now. 

The muscles inside her tighten around his finger as his cock eases in and out of her body. 

He kisses the skin behind her ear, and despite all the other distracting stimulation she shivers with pleasure at his lips sweetly brushing the shell and her lobe. 

“Tell me, are we being bad, or,” his breath fills her ear, “am I just loving you?”

“K- _ Kylo!” _

This feels more scandalous than any toy, position, or naughty place. Every muscle of hers is tensed as hard as stone, so hard she can imagine he feels like he’s bent over one of the lithe statues in the garden. 

“Tell me,” he shifts an arm, and his weight, by resting on his elbow and rolling his hips. With his free arm slightly more mobile, he swivels it to brush a hand between her legs. “Rey, talk to me.”

That tone is just too hungry: it’ll crumble her to dust. His cock is stuffing into her, he’s teasing her ass, and now a talented hand plays with her clit like he’s promising her he hasn’t forgotten it. She’s going to melt. Or explode. Either way she won’t exist in a few moments. 

“Rey,” he prompts again.

“I need you to tell  _ me,” _ she whines back, absolutely overwrought. 

He picks up on her hesitation and steadies his movements so all she has to do is feel him inside her for a moment. And even that is too much. 

“Yes I am,” he tells her with complete confidence, “how does it feel?”

“Too much,” she squirms, her face completely red and burning. A brush of her cheek against the cool sheets just brings up more fire. 

She reaches for the hand he has on the mattress holding up his weight over her. He can’t do much with it, but she covers his splayed fingers with hers. 

“Tell me what you need.”

“Just say it, that thing before—“ She wails, tears starting to form in her eyes as he slides his thumb over her clit, back and forth, in fast, furious swipes. 

“I’m loving you, Rey. How does it feel?”

“Say it again.”

“Yes, I’m loving you. I’m loving this little body. I’m loving my good girl. I’m going to cum in this sweet, screaming woman and then she’s going to put my damn ring on and stop wasting my time.”

Her face wrinkles up in frustration. Did he have to bring that up  _ now? _

“I’m close,” she tries instead, “say it again.”

His hands leave their more persuasive areas to secure around her hips. His thrusts are brutal, but they don’t  _ feel _ like rough sex, they feel like he’s giving all of himself. Getting yanked back onto his dick over and over makes this bubble of selflessness overtake her. Just  _ over and over _ so she can let go _. _ It’s freeing. 

“Say it,” she whimpers. 

There’s questions that should be asked instead, the one that breaks her is,  _ how long? _

How long was this happening to them and he couldn’t even let her know? He made her wait for how long?

His body crashes over hers. His voice tight and greedy in her ear. Adjusting to the new angle and the weight of him folded over her, she brings up her knee on the bed so he slides against her  _ just _ right. They both jerk at his next thrust: his in response to hers, hers because it feels like a thread holding her together has been cut and she can go slack.

He tells her of the choice he’s made. 

“I’m loving you. I’m loving you. I’m loving you,” she can feel his jaw clench and hear him grunt to himself when she tightens up around him and cums. Whatever this is: she will never escape it. She has no purchase already so she’s blown off the edge of a cliff to hear his voice, gravelly and rough, in her ear, “until the end of time. I’m loving you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not me copping out with the unspoken true love resolution.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> goblin brain: frussy has arrived

She was trying to explain to herself how she wound up here. Who the hell got _scouted_ for an escort site? 

Maybe because she looked as broke as she felt. 

She had taken too many sips of water. The waiter had already refilled her glass a couple of times, and there was water in front of her. A full glass, a stolen sip, was at least something to work on while she waited. At least something to do other than check her email and voicemails, a bloated mailbox, nothing good, never good, and feel dread filling her up like she was a sponge for it.

She was dangerously nearing having to vacate the table, and she was territorial about not doing that or he might think she bailed. But that also ran the risk of him showing up and her needing to ditch for the bathroom, where he could take one look at her raggedy clothes and vanish before she got back to the table. 

_“You’re Rey?”_

He was a little late. 

Late was fine, everyone was only human, but this occasion felt pretty serious. So serious Rey had been embarrassingly early, skipped an afternoon class and everything, to be parked outside the restaurant over a half hour ago. That was mostly involving breathing exercises and convincing herself she could do this before she even unbuckled her seatbelt. So when he finally sat down on the tail end of twenty minutes after the appointment was set, she had been close to excusing herself from the table and leaving, not even able to order herself lunch for her losses because the place he chose to meet was so mind-numbingly swanky. 

First she saw the trappings of courtesy to absolve his lateness: the way he hastily unbuttoned his jacket as he sat down, the rushed tone of the introduction, the way he nodded in greeting at the server. 

“Yes,” she said, letting all those things form a man in front of her, who was taking his seat across from her at the table. “So you’re Kylo, then.”

When they were both seated, she let out a steadying breath. So they were really doing this. 

He took a steadying breath and sat back in his chair, looking her over. Until that moment, he had been a blur in front of her, so she looked too. She straightened and bit her tongue to keep from squirming. She’d better get used to it. A lot of this was going to involve being looked at. 

“A meeting ran late,” he added with a sense of authority. It wasn’t meek, or powerless. Nobody was holding him captive, not _letting_ him leave: it was strange to be told that the matter was both unchangeable and still to an extent under his control. “It was for an account where I had to be thorough.”

She wasn’t sure if the soft opening to their lunch meeting involving twenty minutes left to her own thoughts made this easier or harder. She certainly wasn’t calmed now that he was here.

“I feel like I should shake your hand,” she joked lamely, extending hers across the table, reaching for him. 

He took hers immediately. Automatically. She tried not to swallow when his massive bear paw closed around her fingers. It was a firm handshake, he had to have one, she knew just from looking at him. It felt like a test. 

She tightened her arm and fought against it. Not letting it shake _through_ her. There was a sense of relief when it was over.

Then he asked, quietly, still looking at her hand: “Do you bite your nails?” 

And her stomach dropped. 

She had been biting at her thumbnail before he arrived, the tip was essentially sawed off in her teeth and rough at the edge. And this was after being told she’d need weekly manicures from the site. 

“When I’m nervous. I...I’m trying to stop.”

He unfolded his hand slightly from around hers but kept it steady in his grip. His thumb worried the length of hers, flipping it back to examine the damage to her otherwise neatly, if unprofessionally painted, short nails. 

He didn’t say anything, he just looked at them. 

Was this some fetish she didn’t know about?

“Is that going to be a deal-breaker?”

He flicked his eyes up to hers, a smirk nudging one side of his mouth upwards. 

“I would ask that you not, as it’s a little jagged to the touch. But your hands are nice,” he rotated her hand once more to display a row of orderly black fingernails as if to demonstrate. “Your hands are lovely. I only ask because I don’t like being scratched.”

That was far more reasonable a request than she had anticipated. 

The manipulation of her arm, wrist, and hand in his grasp was a serpentine twist that made her feel like he handled her...skillfully. She didn’t seize up when he touched her, and despite not knowing a single thing she should be looking out for while meeting him, that at least felt important.

She took her arm back from his grasp and he released her gracefully, like anyone should after handling wildlife. 

_“Ever?”_

His eyebrows raised but he didn’t look up. 

He flipped open the menu, which she had been ignoring. Maybe she should have picked something before he got there. 

“It’s open to discussion if you don’t bite your nails for me.”

His tone was surprisingly flirtatious. 

It was hard to focus on the menu. This topic had snatched her attention without her meaning to let it. She had expected to have to be warmed up to this idea to inevitably still drop it, never going through with anything and leaving it as a weird story she’d only be brave enough to tell her friends in another ten years. She was going to dig until she uncovered something that would make her leave the site forever. 

Instead she was naturally curious, wanting to poke around in his implication. Rey settled on letting herself smile, pleased with herself, and raised her eyebrows as if she had things to be coy about as well. He was massive, with leagues of pale skin, and was already a little too spoiled. Marking up that pretty skin with her nails became one of the _pros_ of pursuing this arrangement.

She snuck a peek at his face as he scoured the page with intense eyes. 

“Are you interviewing with anyone else from the agency?”

He glanced up at her when she wasn’t expecting it. It took her aback for a second. 

His eyes had a distinct twinkle to them. It wasn’t particularly friendly, but it was glittery and strangely compelling.

“Just you.”

She raised her eyebrows. She’d been given two other profiles this week and had tentative plans to meet with them. How seriously was she supposed to take candidates? Was it like dating, or was it like hiring a babysitter? Was she the baby?

From the glittery pinks of the website when Maz had revealed to her the purpose of her own profile, that yes, Rey was the _baby,_ in one respect at least. 

From her face, he must have perceived her confusion. He spoke quite neatly, all the dust wiped off of his thoughts when they came through to be delivered. 

“There were a few profiles that had been sent my way, but there wasn’t anyone that suited me. I’d been holding myself back at a distance before pursuing.”

He gave the menu a precursory glance and seemed to immediately settle on something. It was set aside with a decided weight and Rey felt like she should fold her menu closed as well, even though she hadn’t even had the time to read through the full ingredients listed on a salad.

“Please, look for something you like. Anything.”

She opened her menu back up and cleared her throat dubiously. 

“And what changed?”

He leaned back in his chair in this frighteningly negotiable way.

“There was also an indelible attraction when I first saw you. I know what I like, and that way, when you’re looking for what it is you want, then you know when you’ve found it.”

Her brows pulled together in a crease at the center. A lot to unpack there. Though as much as she felt the immediate, self-conscious urge to be on her best behavior around him, she would have to say there was an easy flow to how they talked to each other. Probably because he was attracted to her. It made things simple. 

_What do you like_ felt too much like fishing for a compliment. And she wasn’t sure she wanted whatever he decided it was about her to be true.

“So how do we...do this?”

He seemed to pull the brakes on some internal momentum. It was interesting how she hadn’t assumed he’d been nearing the edge of a cliff until he swerved. 

“Have you ever made such an arrangement before?” 

“Never,” she admitted, touching her hair nervously. Her hand came up to ruffle under one of the layers looped at the back of her skull.

His eyes skated over her.

“That color is striking on you. I’d like for you to wear it often. Coming into this brand-new, sartorial choices on my part, you wouldn’t mind? If I provide you with clothes for our meetings, including underwear?”

She shrugged: already feeling like a chill was lacing around her like a ribbon. She had been brought up to speed that this was about her beauty, her appearance, and more importantly, herself as a piece of appearances for clients like him. His profile had listed he had wanted a bit of a girlfriend experience, at least formally. A tasteful date. Maybe, while shabby, she was raw enough material for that. Something that could be built on instead of efforts that couldn’t be edited down.

She just hadn’t pictured him so controlling, verbal, vocal, explicit about control. 

“Whatever you want. I don’t care about clothes and things. I just want—I want the security.”

He looked up at her with a kind of pointed eye contact almost as if he wanted to pen notes during this meeting, but didn’t out of respect, instead took this confession to commit to memory the most sincerely. 

She took another sip of water. His directness cast a distinct chill: at least one that stirred her chest and made her shiver. This was getting bracingly real. Her pulse was thundering. 

_These men can be particular,_ Maz had told her, _they want things their way. The idea that this is easy is deceptive. It takes a certain type of person to bear with it without losing themselves. One who isn’t afraid of work._

Rey wasn’t.

“That’s not a problem, I mean, it’s a job— _it’s what you’re paying for,”_ she amended quickly, hoping it wasn’t insulting to refer to this as a common chore. 

“On top of the agreed financial compensation, would you permit me to provide you with luxury items of my choosing?” 

“I have no problem with them, or the clothes, it’s just if you want to please me…”

It sort of spilled out. She had meant to slide past any particular pleasure on her part. But his attention was hooked in now, deep, from the way he stared at her. 

He wanted her to finish that sentence. And there was power in ending it truthfully. 

“Tell me how to please you,” he rushed, in a formal tone throughout, but he sounded a little lost for breath.

If she only had an answer to that. This was dangerous. She retreated a little, swallowing. Her mouth suddenly felt very dry.

“I guess, don’t make me feel alone,” she rattled the ice in her glass, unable to look at him, “I don’t have anyone in the city, really. Or anywhere. I’m on my own. So I’ll waive the gifts and the designer clothing, or at least more than what you want me to wear when we’re together, if—”

This was a shitty thing to have to admit to anyone, but especially herself.

“—if my pipes are fucked up, or I’m stuck on the side of the road with a flat, I just want to be able to call you and get help. You may never even have to give it. But if it was there—”

He narrowed his eyes, assessing her.

_“You want a provider.”_

She nodded, her body going soft in her chair. 

_I want._

This was a terrible interview for what she had referred to as a job. He was a stranger who wanted to have sex with her: she was a willing and able young woman in her 20’s and she was still failing at every level. And who was _he_ to take care of her? She must have seemed absurd and not at all suited to this line of work, if she was going to ask her sugar daddy for some moral support every now and again.

She really didn’t have the least idea for how this was supposed to work, did she?

“I just want the occasional hand to bail me out. I don’t have one.”

He narrowed his eyes, sensing her obscure the confession in something a little less vulnerable. She could, from her side of the table, sense him slowly putting that information away like one did a weapon. 

“Do you need help now?” he asked quietly.

Rey glanced around the restaurant. It wasn’t packed, but it was a social hour, where the people here during the rush stretched out in the chairs and got caught up with cups of coffee. Lazy. Broad daylight, public place, neutral territory as was insisted by the agency. 

This felt like a lot to admit in this dining room. 

“I’m in debt,” she tried to shrug it off, “so bad things happening to me gain quicker momentum. I feel like I’m outrunning them all the time. I don’t know if I can keep going on like this.”

He watched her carefully, as if looking could harm something fragile.

“Plenty of people go into these arrangements for security. Shelter. I wouldn’t be worthy of this meeting if I was not prepared to provide it.”

The heaviness that had settled in her chest began to dissolve. She felt assured by how unphased he seemed. This was more than reasonable, and generous, on top of it. 

“But you can hopefully understand my reluctance for that. Being dependent and then tossed aside. That makes this feel too much like a real relationship.”

There was something stirring at the edge of their private conversation, which might as well have been going like they were the only two people in the world. He lifted his hand at once and it felt like the room just got colder, even though she flinched, but it was a gesture aimed at something clearly behind her. Rey glanced over her shoulder to see the waiter retreating as he had been dismissed before he even arrived at their table. 

“Is this why you’re nervous?”

She raised her eyebrows at him, tucking her fingers under her palm to hide her jagged nail. 

“At this point I will pursue any option,” she replied crisply, “A lack of control is unnerving to me. But in the position I’m in I don’t really have control to lose.”

He leaned back in his seat, and hand resting on the back of the chair beside him. Between them. It was so long his hand was dangerously near to her forearm, but not near enough to touch her.

“You have complete control of what you’re getting into with me. The ability to refuse me, to choose what you want, is a part of the negotiation, Rey. You have something I want. I have something you want. And these are not static things we want from each other. This doesn’t exchange hands one time, done. It’s building a relationship. Trust is essential to me. It is _required_ of you to be honest with me. That is non-negotiable. If I am to take you to bed, I want to know the instant something is not pleasurable. That is where you have control. In return, I want for you to be able to know you can turn to me in any way you’re comfortable.”

“And let you have me.”

He nodded without making a sound.

She nodded back. It made sense. 

Her silence in return was more reluctant. 

He sat up straighter and lowered his arm to the table, leaning on it to bring his mouth closer and his voice lower.

“I can’t drop everything at any given time and come to you,” he began carefully, and it shouldn’t be crushing to hear, but it still was, _“but_ you will certainly not be left stranded when you call me with a flat tire in the middle of nowhere. I will make sure you’re somewhere safe and sound as soon as you contact me. I’m not a plumber, but I can cover the costs of the services of one if there’s an issue where you live. I need you to understand what it is I can give, and for you to trust that bond for how it works.”

This was realistic. Transparent. Plain.

And solid as stone.

“I didn’t peg you for an amateur plumber,” she admitted quietly, her voice first slow and then faster when his mouth twitched in amusement, “I think I can handle myself a little better knowing this, exactly how it is.”

His eyes softened. 

“I don’t think it will be long, under an arrangement with me, to clear you of that burden. And slow things down again, so you can enjoy them.”

She straightened up at that. This felt bizarrely like therapy. He reasonably could take her under his wing and handle it, but this flickered through her mind amongst vague memories of social workers she had grown up amongst. _Creating the tools to be independent._

Who knew being spoiled by a millionaire could be so accommodating? 

“I have two more matches to interview with this week,” she blurted out.

He blinked at her, and that steady sense of control he wielded so perfectly since sitting down seemed to blur. It was subtle: just in the draw of his brow and how one nostril curled to show his distaste for this fact. 

This bothered him. 

It was a little thrilling to see him get possessive. It also didn’t feel like she had to be unreasonably petty to do so. She just had to be honest about how much power she had in this scenario too.

She leaned back in her seat, letting a lazy smile spread across her face. 

“But I’m gonna cancel.”

* * *

Rey rolls over on her side with some difficulty: Kylo has been stretched out on top of her ever since he finished, racing right after her into oblivion. 

He hauled her over that edge and then dove right in after her. At least she’s not alone here. Hopelessly sweaty, her hair matted to her face, too limp to brush the tangles aside from her eyes.

Everywhere they touch now is hot and _wet,_ even passively. It feels more like wrestling than cuddling to get her weight onto her hip so she can breathe again. 

“That was quite a gamble, proving you can in fact _make love_ using my ass.”

He laughs with his lips against the sweat coating her neck. He’s still touching her. Moving subtly. Like he can’t stop himself from feeling her.

“I think it paid off.”

_“Right.”_

With a shove of her elbow, he rolls off and her airways lose all that added pressure. She gasps the sex-musky air into her lungs. He curls up behind her, replaced, cuddling like he still can’t lose touch with her. 

_He is not a ‘cuddler’ afterwards. After sex, he’s a brisk-shower and ’I-have-an-important-call-to-take’-er._

Maybe he was lacking this. Intimacy that wasn’t just kink-related. She searches for the word that evades her for a moment. _Affection._

She can only stay silent until she’s aware of each breath from his lips puffing against the nape of her neck.

“Do you think you needed this?” 

He stirs when she asks, lifting his head from the pillow with more effort than a man with a neck that sinuous requires, eyes furrowed in exhaustion. An arm is thrown around her chest, and she accepts it, strumming her fingers through his limp, extended ones without thinking so their hands interlock with each other, “I won’t judge you if you did. A romantic week away from it all where you can just...pretend.”

Pretend _what_ she isn’t exactly sure. 

His silence is so pervasively cold that, even though she is so confident in that theory she’d like to just let it sit and fall asleep in the haze they’ve fallen into, she wiggles in his grasp to look back at his face instead. 

“Maybe I do need it,” he replies, and his face looks so _wretched_ that she knows he doesn’t give an inch towards agreeing with her. 

She sighs and kisses his cheek. 

Kissing is a weirdly political matter between them. He’ll press possessive kisses to her cheek in public with some frequency, she greets him with them as part of the illusion he’s paying for. She’s not pretending to be a girlfriend because they’re pretending to the rest of the world that what they have is too tasteful to talk about, she is introduced as Rey —no other title with little need for introduction— they kiss each other because they’re adults and he’s a handsome man and she’s a beautiful woman and that’s all the world needs to see. 

Kissing in private is messier, more entangled and loaded. Kissing is pleasurable, it’s engulfing at times, she can feel when he uses it to overwhelm her like she’s being eaten. There is a certain adversarial weight to the gesture like European alliances sending troops or fertile little duchesses over borders in exchange for favors to be repaid later. 

“I just want you to be honest with me if that’s what it is,” she rests her cheek back on the pillow, “because you know the reality you’re going back to. Where it stops. I have to wait until you’re done.”

He squeezes his arms around her waist. There’s quiet _fury_ in the action, she can feel every muscle coil, rippling under his warm skin. Even if it doesn’t hurt. She exhales to make herself smaller, because the squeeze is trying to contain her.

“Is that all you do?” his voice is raw like he’s been screaming, but the strain is coming from the core of him, not exhaustion in his vocal chords, “waiting until I’m done?”

She swallows.

“Isn’t that my job? Biding my time until the day you’re done with me?”

 _“Waiting?”_ he breathes heavily against the nape of her neck, “For this to end? Did you not just hear me ask to spend the rest of my life with you?”

She brings her knees up to her chest and she feels him soften behind her when she tenses. Scared of pushing her. 

“Did you always see it this way, acquiring me completely? Is that why you took me on? Or _any arrangement?_ I’m just the first person who made the cut for you?”

This is a lot of questions answered with questions. He breaks first and gives the first straight answer. 

His gorgeous hair sifts between them like volcanic sand as he shakes his head. He looks hurt. Deeper than she ever thought she could touch him.

“If I had known from the start how much I would grow to want you, I wouldn’t have survived the wait.”

Rey takes a deep breath at the confession. 

“This is just business—”

“It’s not,” he stubbornly tightens his arms around her, “it was a relationship we built with boundaries in place to project you. For you to have control. I’m not renegotiating that contract so our same terms are expanded to include marriage. It’s not that I’m hiring you to appear to be my wife. I want to lift the contracts from all of this and move forward. No handing over your control, no agency interference, no calls to Maz after every time you see me to verify I haven’t murdered you yet.”

She twists her face further into the pillow.

“It’s policy…”

“I know,” he sets his hands on either side of her and hovers over her, his eyes reassuring, “and it makes people in your position safer. I don’t resent it for protecting you when you’re in a vulnerable arrangement. I also don’t want you to feel like you can’t be safe with me now, where we are. I’m not asking you to marry me so things can stay the same. I’m asking so they change.”

This is overwhelming. How things were _worked._ They made impossible sense. She’d given two years to trusting that and he was taking it away.

“You’re scaring me.”

His hands stop trying to keep her body still, as he sits back on his knees they come up to cup her face. 

“Why?”

She squirms but he doesn’t let go. 

“I’m sorry,” he steadies her by cupping her jaw, supporting her neck, “tell me why you’re scared.”

He doesn’t have to say it like there’s something wrong with her.

_“What you said.”_

Her hands settle on his chest and _push._ The struggle is futile. He’s heavy and solid as stone in this shared bed. She’s writhing naked under him, tucking her cheek to the pillow because she’s crying and she doesn’t want him to see. 

He does anyway.

“Rey,” he lifts her closer despite her struggle, brushing at the tears with the pad of his thumb. He doesn’t wipe them away to get rid of them, he touches them as if to test their substance, “what did I say that scared you?”

“What you—said—when you were cumming in me,” she hiccups out. 

His eyes widen. He holds her steady but she can see his whole orbit has been set off course, unsure, stalling. 

“I c—can’t stand it when you’re late,” she growls at him, cheeks and lips and eyes swollen from crying so hard, so quickly, “now it’s like it has to start hurting me when you make me wait for you.”

She had never let herself imagine a future where he was her husband, but their past flooded in to fill the image of their marriage bed. She was well-informed by so many nights waiting for him to show up. Would this be her, clutching the sheets, crying _come back, come back_ until he appeared again?

“Rey.”

He buries her body against his. Once she feels her chest flattened against his, the intensity of her crying numbs. She quiets. Feeling gathered up and softened. 

It wrings her out inside. Was this what she was always hoping for?

She should feel nothing but frustration and escalating rage from this bastard, only drawing her closer the uglier it gets, and what it is she’s showing him.

“I have two fucking seconds to decide if I’m ready to marry you. When I had to wait two fucking years to find out you’re in love with me.”

“Were you waiting to hear that?”

She tucks her jaw into his shoulder, teeth clenched, not wanting to answer that. 

A lie might do the trick. Spinning it. 

“I don’t think I wait around for things I don’t expect coming.”

“I think you do,” his hands settle at the back of her thighs and wrap them around his waist. She accepts this new position, clinging to him, as he sits back to hold her in his lap. “In fact, I think you’ve been waiting for this long before you knew me.”

Her nails dig into his arms. 

“Knock it off.”

“I’m here,” he threads his fingers in her loose hair. “I’m sorry I was late.”

He sets her back, gently, on her ass on the bed, her limbs sprawling out as he pours himself over her. Something strange settles in her stomach, right under her ribs. _He’s got her._

“I’m going to fuck you now,” he informs her, adjusting their positioning with gentle, soothing hands. Rey blinks up at him, allowing him to at least lead where he was going with this. 

Her hands come up to grip his arms, and her legs hug him around the waist. 

For a long time she thought her biggest fear that whoever she waited for would make her feel stupid, or worthless, or like nothing for all the time she gave to her hopes. But a new fear has been given light. 

What if what she waited for was too good, and it got screwed up?

“The last time didn’t exactly prove to me that you don’t have to be dominant all the time.”

He lifts her chin in one hand and makes her rise up, really reaching for it, before he graces her lips with a kiss. 

“I was proving something more important,” his cock rubs gently against her folds. She shivers at the feel of him moving against her, whimpers when his head slips _just_ inside, “and I’ll prove it to you again.”

* * *

“How does it feel?”

Rey twisted in the mirror, sliding the coat tighter around her waist, then looser, unsure how it was supposed to be worn. 

“I’m not sure I’m a fur person.”

There was a faint, short exhale from his nose that seemed to accept this remark as humorous. 

“You could have told me that.”

She shrugged, the black mass of sable fur falling over on shoulder so it was bare under the lights. It was a little Cruella, stark and severe, but her eye trained on the naked skin in her reflection. It wasn’t bad. She had been certain it wasn’t good, when she looked at the coat on the hangar, but she didn’t feel like a bad person for trying it on.

“Well, I didn’t know that yet,” she looked over her bare shoulder at him. 

Kylo rarely accompanied her on shopping trips. As someone who hated shopping; she was relieved when the purchases were brought to her. They were things she’d never choose for herself, but were perfectly tailored and somehow fit her personality, or at least a way she tried to see herself. Spending his money alone was a chore: but she’d managed to sneak herself into some stationery shops or quirky markets and her pleasure at showing him her purchases seemed to scratch the same itch for him. His money making her happy made him happy. If she could drum up glee for a jar of artisan pickles, he could vicariously enjoy it. 

That part was nice. It felt like it wasn’t just an image thing. That he wasn’t swathing her in ways to up her status in the eyes of the rest of the world. He let her feed him one of her fancy pickles and relented mildly that it did taste good.

But shopping together felt like a different animal. He insisted on private fittings, and the things she tried on were almost a game. She learned over time there were things she wasn’t _meant_ to like. It was like visiting an art gallery together, and she had to understand the obscure statements in a bunch of lines.

He smirked at her and gave no indication of his opinion of the coat. 

“Don’t wear it for my sake.”

Her face fell petulantly. She twisted around to face him, her hands strumming the coat. It was silky, like a big warm hug. She didn’t really want this thing to be hers, but the dress-up element was appealing. She felt like a different person. One who would give him a piece of her mind. 

“I’m not,” she gave him a look that would make any man automatically call her a bitch, but Kylo just sat up a little straighter in his plush seat of the boutique’s salon. “I don’t know if it’s me because I never had the chance to try it, okay?”

She swiveled back around and didn’t like the pouty expression staring back at her in the mirror. She stood different in this coat. She looked different. 

Getting to try things was actually the way she could discover she didn’t like them. Before him, she just assumed she didn’t like things: going out, shopping, fancy food. Then with him, she could actually try them when she was just too busy and tired and broke to know for certain. Rey didn’t know how to turn that into a compliment so she flipped it into a slow-boiling anger. All these things he gave her that she never had. 

She was not a fur person, but at least she could try. 

Maybe she was angry because it totally upset her principles when he offered these things like they weren’t a big deal. 

Her fingers tangled in the black fur.

“It kind of looks like I’m wearing your hair,” she peered back at him, softening herself. 

His smirk turned dangerous. 

“Like you hunted me?”

She took a delicate step towards him, nodding, off of the little platform in front of the mirror. She’d never walk barefoot in the fitting room of a department store, but this little private alcove was clearly not reversed for the public. It was a _room,_ not a dirty stall with black scuffs all over the walls. 

She placed her knee beside his hip, baring her leg under the folds of the shapeless fur, on his chair and threaded her hands into his hair. 

“You don’t sound very scared.”

Kylo shook his head, his eyes alight. 

“I’m far too intrigued.”

He was always a man who was hot enough that Rey figured _I’d let him do what he wants with me._ That lax attitude hadn’t led her astray. It had even brought her to orgasms more intense than any she’d ever felt, if still not allowed to attach feelings to. But this moment, he looked so handsome, so relaxed, so sexy that she for the first time had stirring feelings about doing things _to him._

She let the coat fall away at the chest to display the lace of her bra as she came up to straddle him. 

He was so ready to accept her onto his lap, his eyes burning, that she flinched back for a moment. Did she know what she was trying? Did she realize what it could change? It was like she cuddled up to a rattlesnake and only just then heard the tail shake in a threat. 

It felt like too much power. Power she didn’t know how to do anything with. 

“I don’t think it’s me,” she admitted abruptly, her hands settled on his chest. Maybe in apology, feeding the power back to him, when she settled back on her ass. 

He swallowed, this kind of hungry burn in his eyes extinguishing in seconds. 

“I’m sorry. It was a bit of an outlandish choice.”

“I don’t mind when that happens,” she stared at the last button closed before his shirt exposed his throat to her. It seemed like the safest place to look: where he was officially dressed and proper. “I never got to—try things like this. Before I met you. I had to work a lot just to have the essentials. I don’t know if it makes me bad, trying these things on, but at least I can decide I know what I don’t want when I know what it is I’m turning down.”

His hands came up to cover hers. 

“Did you like getting to try it?”

“Yes.”

“Did you like how it feels?”

Rey shrugged aside the coat and let it fall to the floor. She felt a little naughty doing that. She didn’t want to be a fur person. Too much baggage. 

“I like that I can start to choose who I am.”

His hands came up to cover her hips. It faintly occurred to her she was nearly naked in a store, and no matter how fancy the treatment was here, she wasn’t sure this was encouraged. 

“Educated decisions,” he rumbled up at her thoughtfully. “It doesn’t seem fair that you’ve been forced to make any other kind.”

She had always figured that she would outrun what was trapping her. The debt, the miserable guardians, the schoolwork. Someday she’d be independent and free. And she was, somewhat, in the days she didn’t see Kylo. When she didn’t have to worry about her heat being shut off, she could go out for a drink with her classmates. She could see a movie in theaters she’d been meaning to watch. She could spend fifty dollars on herself, with her own money, and know she chose something that mattered to her.

“That’s what I have you for,” she answered quietly, “I guess I should thank—”

He stops her lips with his large fingertip, pinning the top and bottom with a faint pressure.

“Don’t thank me,” his reply was grave, her spine straightened at his own severity, “it’s only what’s right.”

* * *

She wakes up before he does: in that way that has her eyes fly open and full awareness floods her all at once. She’d been proposed to. He loves her. This is a problem. 

She shifts under the weight of his arms around her. Heavy. Trapped. 

It took two years for him to hold her in bed like this and she had to do this in one sitting? It’s _overwhelming._

It takes strength to glance at the man sleeping next to her, tangling her in his grasp. It’s quite an undertaking, like a tourist voyage to a tropical island or a Greek temple. Her undivided attention must be given to observe him, monumental as he is. First at a distance, and with that usually a great climb. 

She feels her hands tense and un-tense. Itchy. Fidgety. 

Her eyes blink at those impatient fingers.

The look of them is familiar when she pictures his hands that way. What it always means. 

Rey slithers out of bed without thinking. She’s due her turn, but she hadn’t been given the option to prepare for it like he had. With a grumble, she wanders to his closest bag: a familiar weekender. Even if spoiled, she doesn’t take a lot of liberty with his things. But she wants to know what’s there. 

“What are you looking for?”

Her hair falls over one shoulder as she glances back at him. He’s half-sitting up, probably just enough to reach a vantage point to see where she’s crouched on the floor. Red-handed in the offense of snooping through his things. 

Is this allowed? He had already offered her everything he owned. 

“Did you,” she brushes her hair out of her face. Caught. Flustered. “Did you—bring anything?”

He lets out a delighted sigh, shifting in the sunny blankets like a giant kitten. 

“Yes, baby, you can play with whatever you want to.”

She crawls deeper into his suitcase and with some digging, finds a discrete inside pocket with exactly what she needs. 

And a few things she hadn’t planned on that inspire a few ideas. 

He’s still lying on the bed without a care in the world as she climbs back in and swiftly pins his wrists above his head. He raises his eyebrows at her, almost bored, as she secures cuffs around his wrists. 

The fucker has the nerve to _yawn._

“I'm just tired,” he smirks, annoying her and loving it, “please continue.”

She straddles his chest to observe him from above. Checking over her handiwork: having threaded the cuffs in a bar of the headboard. 

If anything, he just squirms in place looking all the more satisfied. Big arms over his head. Bare chest open and covered in sunshine.

She doesn’t know exactly what to do with him like this. It’s like wrecking a ship. His body can’t get away from her, but she certainly can’t steer it her own way from the rock it’s clinging to.

So instead she focuses on his stillness. His inability to escape.

“Am I the only escort you wanted to marry?”

He blinks up at her, surprise widening his eyes too much for the bright light pouring in from the windows, so his lids flutter immediately to shield them.

“You’re the only person I wanted to marry.”

She sits back on his stomach, the feel of his stomach brushing her ass makes her roll herself against him like a cat wanting a stroke.

“If that’s supposed to make me feel special, it only makes me question your judgement.”

He shakes his head slightly. 

“While I admit it was easier this way, we’d be here still even if you were my barista. My TA in college. My mortal enemy.”

His words squeeze at her heart and she tries not to lose focus on his body, which stretches out like an untouched planet under her thighs. This is an opportunity she hasn’t been given before, despite his boundless generosity.

“Why didn’t you tell me that you wanted things a different way than you were getting?”

His lips purse and his head tilts inquisitively. 

“Does that bother you?”

It shouldn’t. It was his money, she shouldn’t really give a shit if he was effectively wasting it when he had enough that he could have anything he wanted.

She smoothes her hands over his chest. He responds more readily than she expected. So solid and untouchable when he was fucking her. Making _him_ shiver is so new. 

She finds she’s angry to have been denied this so long.

“It does,” she admits, “because you weren’t being honest. And say what you will, I don’t think for two whole years what I needed every time we met was to follow your exact instructions.”

He shakes his head.

“I wanted you to tell me your sexual preferences. To be comfortable doing so. You never contradicted the direction we took things, I had hoped if you wanted something, you would express it. I was here to provide.”

Like she’s shit out of luck saying this is all his fault. It’s that boss tone again, and it makes her skin hot, because she’s in charge.

She breathes out all at once in frustration and squeezes her legs around him. It pushes her back slightly into his lap, where she nudges against how much he’s clearly enjoying being vulnerable to her. With a swallow, she focused her suddenly blurry vision on his face.

“The obvious assumption is this is about what you want, unless told otherwise. Why did you want me tied up and helpless almost every time?”

Kylo stares at her expression, all tight lines and sharp angles, and lets out a sigh. 

“I do think you needed to give up control sometimes, maybe not every time you had sex, but meeting with me fulfilled that need. It would not make for a balanced sexual life, but to balance out the rest of your life. I would take care of you. And seeing you letting up control was so satisfying, I’d sustain myself on that image alone for hours on end.”

Rey’s mouth drops open. 

“You paid me to _—for that—_ and then you’d jerk off instead of—?”

She always thought she was above shocking after two years with him but this has her sputtering like she has never seen a cock before in her life, let alone known what it was for.

He raises his eyebrows at her like she was the one being ridiculous. She can hear what he wants to do with her where she is. He wants to smooth his hands over her hips and squeeze her, taking control, stroking her stomach with his thumbs. 

But he can’t. So all he has is the grasp of control he keeps in his very level voice:

“Rey. Was I supposed to call you every time I needed to cum?”

Obviously not. That was ridiculous, and obviously when he was with her he’d orgasm every time. It’s not like she should have expected that be the full spectrum of his sex drive: dedicated to her presence. It feels like he’s hit the nail on the head and it’s excruciating. Her face goes red and she feels her hair actually toss with the ferocity that she shakes it in dissent. 

“Really? Because you seem so _possessive_ of my masturbatory emissions.”

“I just didn’t know you thought about me.”

“Every time. My cum was always for you. And if that’s the way you feel about it , you can have it all.”

_Put that in the wedding vows, Kylo._

Her body hums with approval. There’s a shell around his wanting: she has been polite enough to wait to see what part crawls out of it to meet her. But she never knew before now what is at the heart of it until he’d given her these glimpses, and she wants to pry it open and feast on him.

She doesn’t know how to start until she does: by digging her nails into his chest and raking down his skin. 

From his reaction, he’s grateful for the scratching.

“Please let me be yours,” he whispers as she shifts her hips to squeeze his body how she wants. “I can’t be anyone else’s.”

Something in her flares like a dying sun. No. That’s impossible. 

Having him out in the world, _anyone else’s,_ doesn’t feel right to her. 

She hadn’t really thought it through that if she did let him go, it wouldn’t be that he moved on to the next thing as he always could. If she let him go, someone else could have him, and that made her vision go red for a moment. 

Greedy. Needy. 

A terrified blend of two things she does not allow. 

_“M—ine?”_

He nods up at her, that smug affectation long gone from open, wounded brown eyes. 

“Take it,” he groans, “whatever you want.”

Rey squirms down his body and wraps her hand around his cock. Boldly, without orders. Her strokes are steady and perfunctory: he’s already swollen hard enough, near bursting, and if anything it’s getting him closer in her hand than he wants to be outside of her body. He hisses and his legs tense, she lifts her eyes from his organ to his face. 

He looks terrified: in bliss like hell. 

She drops her hand from him and his erection falls against his stomach, he flinches when he goes untouched and left, precum dotting his tensing belly. He glances up at her through his raised arms: for the first time looking nervous since she tied him up. 

“How did you know I’m angry?”

She supports her weight with a hand on his hip. She’d wanted to keep this question in mind while she teased him for longer than he could stand. 

He withstood her anger longer than she could. 

His eyes are soft on her face, despite his obvious discomfort in the state she left him in. 

“I recognized it. It was familiar,” he glances away, “I told you that I’m angry too.”

Her hands press into his stomach, her palm covering the spot of precum that had leaked from his swollen head. Her chin bows to her chest and her shoulders shake.

_“Rey—”_

His voice reaches but it won’t be enough to touch her. The trembling racks through her. Who would she have become if he had told her from the start that she was seen?

That she wasn’t alone. 

Even if he had told her when he was going to try to.

Her free hand shakes. Focused on her task, she lifts it as it trembles it to wipe a stray tear off her cheek with the back of her knuckles. Sloppily, like the tears just needed to be out of her way like a strand of hair in her eyes. 

She situates his cock between her legs and rubs herself against the base, her fingers curled to delicately hold him against her to work her cunt against. She closes her eyes. 

She hears the cuffs clang as he tries to yank free. 

“I thought it was my turn,” she grinds out without opening her eyes.

He stills. 

“Are you alright?”

“It feels like you’re testing me again.”

The emotions that could cause complications. Setting them up like dominos: just to fall. 

_Angry. Sad. Scared._

“I’m down _here,”_ he sounds so shocked she opens her eyes. She sees it now, with her spine arched as she rides high above him. He’s not making her do anything. “I’m just not putting the brakes on when it gets too much. I’m not in charge, Rey. You are.”

Her hand cups the length of him tighter to her slit and her hips work faster. A fuzzy feeling coils in her belly as her parted cunt runs back and forth over his cock. Using him. Feeling like a bad master. 

He’s hers to do with whatever she wants and it’s terrifying. It’s more than figuring out how to spend a fortune. It’s about knowing where to even start on an entire new world.

“Sure, I’ll be in charge,” she challenges, her whole jaw tight and locked like she’d tasted something sour, “as soon as you have me where you want me, legally yours, forever.”

There’s that dry humor on his face again, but it’s dizzy, which is probably why his reply comes quick:

“What medieval marital practices do you think I’m going to enforce with you?”

He’s so _mouthy._

She’s not used to topping, even in her experience before him. It’s a lot of power to be handed. It makes something panicked constrict in her chest. 

She lifts herself off his lap enough to nudge his tip at her entrance. 

“I was a- _bout_ to be free.”

Her little hiccup undercuts her anger. And her authority. 

He yanks at the cuffs on his wrists: sensing this. Coming in like _he_ needs to support _her._

She thinks about the future in a way she hasn’t wanted to for months. Graduated, hopefully with a job, living a life that wasn’t about acting like how other people wanted her to act. It wasn’t realistic to think they would keep doing this. 

Even if she liked it.

What was it he had said at their first meeting? About making her independent?

She isn’t sure he had ever planned for her to be too independent for _this._

She wants to slide herself down on his cock. He looks like he needs it so much. He has found every little place inside her that feels so nice, and some empty-minded wiggling of her own hips would feel so good right now. Especially with him pinned. 

But she feels shaky, like when her foot slipped on the stairs and she barely caught herself.

“That’s what I want,” he sounds closer to pleading than before, like she had first pictured, and she’s grateful, “For you to choose this. Because calculating what you’ve earned for everything you’ve given me has been getting insulting.”

Would things have calmed down, would they have stopped, would she have ever been able to feel a thing if he hadn’t supported her for two years?

There were things that didn’t feel real until him. The way food tastes at the restaurants he brought her too. How she looks in the right dress. What her body is capable of. 

It’s not something to be resigned to: it’s possibility. 

Her hands fall heavy on his chest as she twists her hips over him, feeling too much and not better and not sure what she’s doing is helping. Her head feels heavy. She hangs it forward and rocks herself on him. Her cunt feels too sensitive, she wants to shy away from him with every nerve he strokes against. 

It feels _weird._

She doesn’t want to let him down. She knows she wants this. Him, like this. Herself to have this power. 

“I don’t,” she takes a deep breath and settles herself off his thigh, abandoning his swollen cock, “I’m not sure.”

Worry creases between his brows. 

“Are you alright?”

“Yeah, I just—” she swallows and reaches to undo the cuffs, “—I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

His rigid body goes lax. It’s that easy to leave the headspace she put him in. It feels strange, too loose, like she’s the one who’s been untied. His hands come up to her hips and he strokes reassuringly.

He tilts his chin to be able to catch her downturned eyes.

“What’s wrong.”

She settles off of him, on her knees, beside that sunken-ship body. 

“I don’t know. It just felt like too much for a moment.”

His hand rises to cup her cheek. She’s expecting a placation, some kind of guidance, some awkwardness until she relents. His thumb strokes in a circle as she waits. 

“Are you hungry?” 

* * *

“That’s not a breakfast for someone of your stature.”

Whereas her breakfast was the inverse of his. She had crepes, bacon, and an omelet. Kylo selected something lighter to be prepared for himself. 

“Is that a size joke or do you truly think it’s beneath me to eat a grapefruit?”

She leans back in her seat, knees to her chest, smiling at his question. He sounds slightly offended. She’s not sure she’s ever had breakfast exposed to this much sunlight. It’s something that sweetens every bite with an extra deliciousness. 

She just hopes he isn’t hiding that he feels cheated by her giving up her power.

She’d expected after this morning things would be a little more awkward. Instead they got dressed, sat down on the patio for breakfast, and proceeded like they had cancelled plans for something as innocuous as clouds in the sky. It’s not a rift that either of them try to overcompensate. Their nearness isn’t grasping. It isn’t intentionally held separate, never intersecting. She has a sense of what propelled her out of the mood but also regrets not taking the chance she had. 

Maybe that’s his point, being so good about this, she can have every chance if she trusts him.

She shrugs at him.

“It’s insubstantial. You’ll be hungry again in two hours.”

His spoon scoops the last teardrop of fruit from the center. He gives her an incredulous look as the pink flesh disappears between his lips. Crystalline, vibrant pink. 

His mouth is runny with juices. 

“I’m still hungry now,” he admits, and with a sideways glance at her, he holds the rind in his palm, tilts his head back, and brings it up over his mouth. His massive hand clamps down and _squeezes_ and the peel of the grapefruit half leaks red juice from his fist into his open mouth. She watches his grip adjust with a few pulses of his hand, wringing it dry, feeling along the fruit so it yields more for him to drink from. She has no idea how he takes a food that repulses her and transforms it to an overflowing, ambrosial font.

She’s slightly dizzy when he drops the empty husk of the rind, wrung-out, onto his plate. She feels a little bit like what’s left of the fruit now. Just like how a moment ago, she felt like he’d done to that fruit exactly what he had done to her the night before. Especially with him still licking the juice off his lips. 

They’re so pink from the indecent things he’s done to that grapefruit. 

“I’ve changed my mind.”

He blinks innocently at her. 

“About what?”

She smiles into where her knuckles fold her hand into a clenched fist, pressed tightly to her mouth to keep from salivating at the sight of him. 

He’s so much more seductive without force. She’s gotten the message loud and clear about that, but she’s hardly going to stop him now that he’s showing off for her. 

“It looks good.”

He raises one eyebrow with a lazy smile. 

“Having second thoughts?”

She relaxes further into her chair, spreading her legs and getting comfortable, even if he wants her tight and needy and reaching for him. She threw whatever on to go outside, so she ended up in white trousers and an oversized matching blazer while her chest and stomach are bare with only a lace bralette underneath. It’s more comfortable than all her dresses: but now she’s glad she has something she can move more fluidly in.

Her clothes make her sit a certain way. Act a certain way. This morning, naked, she failed at being the kind of dominant person in bed that he is. She felt too vulnerable even trying. Kylo could toss her around, play with her, really overpower. She has known herself to fight back pretty well when he wants her to, when he slowly tells her that she’ll never escape and she knows, just to please him, to try. But that’s not where her power lies. 

Her power over him is he’ll do anything she asks. So she does.

“Let’s have a taste.”

It’s a full grin now, boyish, a little too victorious. Which means he misunderstands her.

“Come here,” she orders lightly, and when he stands readily from his seat she shakes her head. “No, that’s not what I mean.”

Un understands her, but only halfway.

He freezes in place: completely trapped in her authority. It’s thrilling.

She points at the patio stones at her feet bare. 

Does he shiver with pleasure, or rage? She honestly thought this suggestion, if made by her a week ago in a hotel suite, would lead him to simply tear her apart. 

After that tremor, Kylo sinks slowly to his knees. She sits back in his chair and takes a slow sip of water to cool her burning face at the sight of him making his way to her feet on his hands and knees. 

His lips carry over a taste for her, as does his chin from the telling pink stains, and the closer he nears she can pick up where the rivulets stained his throat. Her heart pounds with what kind of attention she has attracted from him, the force that is coming straight towards her. Something in her belly squirms with anxiety as that now that she has him, she has to know what to do with him. Unlike this morning. 

By that time he’s on all fours at her feet, his head practically in her lap. 

She traces her blunt nails along his jaw. 

“Let me see,” she examines his lips with a faint whisper, and then brings her mouth to taste the sour-sweet juice that coats his. She sucks his plush lower lip into her mouth until it’s red, and then bites on the soft skin until he actually whimpers. 

She’s surprised only for a moment at how yielding he is. She only half-believed his enthusiasm for something like this, and believed fully he had said it to placate her. 

His hands shake where they rest on his thighs. Pleasure riots in her nerves when she realizes he won’t touch her until allowed. He’s so much better at this than she was in the beginning, when she needed to be taught everything. 

He knew all the rules because he had enforced them. 

That didn’t mean he isn’t willing to give that up to follow them.

She smiles when he tries to keep her lips on him when she pulls away.

“Are you going to be honest with me?”

She dips her tongue in his mouth, lapping at the sugars coating his tongue from the grapefruit. He tries to keep himself open to her and nod at the same time and doesn’t succeed at it very well.

“Well?”

“Yes,” he replies eagerly. He’s so good. Too good. 

He rushed his answer, only for the sake of obeying properly, and that just wasn’t correct.

She sits back in her chair. 

“Yes, _what?”_

Her chin goes high and she feels the massive spread of warmth through her chest and it radiates out of her, from the crown of her head to her toes. 

He blinks up at her for a moment.

“Yes—” he meets her eyes and it’s the most powerful she has ever felt, “yes, Daddy.”

She’s burning inside hotter than the sun on her skin. With an evil smile, she plucks up the bell from the center of the table and rings for one of the staff to come outside. 

Kylo freezes in place. But he doesn’t get up. He stays where she put him.

Rey doesn’t really commit to the fancy terms of status amongst his employees. They aren’t explained to her so she sticks to names and awkward smiles when they assist her. The person who comes out might be a valet or a butler, or some French name she can’t see spelled so has no idea how to reproduce, but what’s important is the man who exits the door leading outside from the kitchen is the person who served them breakfast. 

She smiles warmly from her chair, like the richest man they know and his boss is on his knees at her feet.

“I’d like another grapefruit, please.”

Kylo’s eyes are closed but he contains his trembling until his employee is back inside. 

Rey ignores him, takes a calm, cool breath of relaxation, and reaches for a slow sip of fresh orange juice until his butler/valet promptly returns with another fruit. 

She smirks to herself and watches Kylo’s bowed stare at the patio stones out of the corner of her eye. Her smile is warm when she gives thanks for the grapefruit and in seconds they’re alone again.

She tilts her head to look at him. 

“Are you embarrassed?”

She didn’t say he couldn’t look at her, that’s clearly something he’s internalized, because he doesn’t lift his eyes from her feet. 

He shakes his head. 

“That’s not an answer.”

“No,” he tilts his chin lower before he adds, _“Daddy.”_

His deep voice in such a shy whisper has her lost. 

She bites her lips and touches his cheek. 

“Being seen on your knees for me in your own house doesn’t embarrass you?”

He swallows and takes a deep breath. There’s still so much power to him. It’s in every quake of his shoulders. How much he reins in to be good for her. 

“A little. I’m sorry.”

Her teeth lightly bite her tongue as she picks up a knife from the table. 

She gives Kylo credit: he doesn’t beg. 

There’s pleasure in running her knife through the flesh until she has two perfect halves: pink flesh dripping down her fingers. 

She casually brings them under Kylo’s nose. 

“You can lick.”

He does, eagerly, again without a pause to consider how to answer her requests. Rudimentary. He follows her for an inch as she pulls her hand away. 

“Thank you,” he whispers. 

Grateful for so little when he clearly wants so much.

She doesn’t have to start all at once. Start simple. Start small. Rey spoons a section of flesh into her mouth. It’s a little too tart, but the quiver of bitterness in her mouth wakes up her muscles that have gone lazy under the sun. 

Little bad ideas spark in her mind as she does. She definitely did not have the energy for this dominating thing this morning. It’s hard to do when she isn’t awake, though she’s not sure she’s good at it at all, but quickness in the moment seems to be where she’s getting good at it. She likes that it makes her feel clever, inventive, in control. 

Obviously he’s a planner for these things. He seems to know how it’s supposed to go. No surprises. 

She’s enjoying being surprised very much. 

“Look at me,” she orders. He lifts his eyes from the ground.

Rey opens her blazer up a little and arches her chest out, lifting half the grapefruit to drizzle the juice over the lace of her bralette. She hears a slight whine in the back of his throat as he watches. The sticky juice coats her skin as the cups over her breasts absorb as much as they can and start to drip the excess down her stomach. 

She swivels in her seat so she faces him, her chest will be level with his face if he lifts off of where he’s resting on his heels. 

“Come here,” she scoots her hips to clutch him with her thighs. “Suck.”

His mouth lands on her breast over the lace and he squeezes his eyes shut and moans. 

“Very good,” she praises, and he shudders from where he’s folded over her lap, leaning on his elbows on either side of her hips on the seat of her chair. “Make sure you get it all.”

His tongue traces the rivulets of juice on her toned stomach. Then it follows the trail back up to her other breast. The rush of jolted nerves is slightly dulled by watching what he’s doing. Knowing he’ll do anything. 

It’s reassurance. The kind she was searching for and missing when he was handcuffed. A flash of ingenuity strikes her.

As he suckles her nipple, the roughness of lace worrying her skin in all his lush tugging, she draws him back to rest on his heels. 

Her legs close and set him back a few inches away from her. He looks like he’s been slapped. 

She swallows and takes the other, untouched half of the fruit and sets it on her lap. The sun glints off the shiny flesh, teasing them both. She touches her fingers to the fruit flesh, tracing natural seams, smiling innocently down at him. He licks his lips. Not finished with his meal.

Her thighs cradle it for him to eat off of. 

“I don’t want you to get hungry,” she combs her fingers into his hair. “I need you to eat.”

He nods frantically.

“But,” she adds with a smirk, “you can’t use your hands.”

Kylo bows over her lap and latches onto the fruit with such a desperate slurp. His mouth vibrates through the rind and pulses against her legs. Juices go _everywhere._

Her hands settle on the stalk of his chorded neck. She can’t close them around his throat, not that she wants to, but the fact her fingers don’t touch and he’s still being so obedient and _good_ anyway quietly amazes her. She pets his hair as his teeth are gnashing against the flesh.

She almost drops the grapefruit, when, with a jolt at the sound of his groan, she spreads her legs open as he buries his face in her clothed lap. 

From the way he devours it: he probably would have kept eating when it was on the ground. Until it's all gone. Even after: until she commands him to stop.

* * *

That night, they cuddle in their bed in a serene silence. 

When he joined her in the shower after a long day by the lake, she had assumed something was coming once he got his hands on her. 

They both glowed at the parts of themselves that were more pointed towards the sun. The skin of his nose. The tops of her breasts. His brow. Her cheekbones. It wasn’t until they had stripped and stood under the lights of the bathroom did she see the sun lingering all over their bodies, browning in some places, burning in others. He had a patch on his neck she wanted to kiss, and mentally shrank back in horror that her intention to soothe would hurt. 

But he didn’t touch her much, except to reach past her for shampoo or to stroke her hip soothingly, or to almost sigh against her neck when there was no more soap in her hair. Relieved she was finished. 

Her hair is wet and curling around her neck as they lay plastered together. Almost like when they’re dry, they’ll be stuck this way. 

She settles her heavy head on his chest. 

“Let’s watch something.”

She knows it’s possible: it’s him, even if she doesn’t see a tv, there will be a way. He nods above her head and reaches for an iPad on the side table. His or hers, she can’t tell at first, and that loss of distinction makes her feel a strange zen settle over who. 

How a moment, who cares. It’s theirs. 

When he swipes the screen, it is littered with notifications. Emails and texts and calls. Kylo’s iPad. Definitely. Only his would be so demanding. 

Her heart soars when he swipes past all of them and begins to scroll through a streaming site. In a small way, it feels like he chooses her when he ignores them. 

“What do you want to—?”

“I want you to choose,” she replies simply, glancing up at him, thinking about that movie again.

He blinks at her, his fingers going still against the screen. 

He swallows. 

“Do you like—?”

She leans up and kisses his throat. She gets to feel him swallow against her lips this time. Nervous. There’s a fidget that works his way down from his shoulders to his toes. 

“Whatever you want.”

He’s vulnerable from this request: after not blinking at a single other thing she’d asked from him. 

He’d shared something with her, on their first date. She just...it _was_ boring, to be fair. But it was a part of him. And it created a hurt between them, deep down, she knew because he never tried to make her watch a documentary again. The last time they watched a movie together, they had selected almost the first mutual suggestion, a neutral, inoffensive choice, in that polite way that roommates do with each other. Not friends. Not couples. 

He’s a strange man. Hard to read. Rarely vulnerable. Somehow perfect and inept at being romantic all at once. 

Trying, for her, to bend these things into something she’d want.

It feels like time to mend him a little. 

She takes a deep breath as she tilts her face up to him. Hoping he knows that this matters.

“I don’t want you to choose something you think I’ll like. I want you to pick something you want to watch.”

He takes a deep breath and glances at the screen in his lap. His fingertip swipes in a self-conscious scroll.

“I’d been meaning,” he wets his lips, _“this?”_

She wraps herself around him like a barnacle and she swears she can see him blush at her attention. 

“Put it on, baby, and let me hold you.”

He obeys so well. Folding herself up in her arms with his head on her chest. She strokes his hair, and settles in. 

She braces herself for the impending dullness: and then realizes that enduring it is exactly that he doesn’t want between them. Why he held back from sharing. 

“Kylo?”

He’s focused on the screen but drops a kiss onto the crown of her head. 

“Yes, Rey?”

“If I ask you to explain something to me, you won’t treat me like I’m stupid?”

It’s not like he has in the past. Her hand fans across his chest when she asks it, soothing the possibility that he may think he has. It’s a small confession of what scares her. Not him. But a feeling. 

He blinks at her, ignoring the clipped narration for a subject he probably already knows backwards and front.

“I would never do that, because you’re not stupid.”

A little shiver runs through her when he nips a kiss on her mouth to seal his promise. 

“You can ask me anything,” he adds imperiously, snuggling her close to his body. 

She feels safe. Cared for. Not exactly riveted to the screen: but knowing how to be with him while he shares something with her. 

* * *

The next morning, she eases herself out of bed, out of his grasp, even as he kisses and baits her back into the sheets. She wants to, truly, but she forgot something important. 

“I just have to—call Maz,” she admits, and it feels like popping this inflation of joy over the last few days with a pin. “Tell her that we arrived and have settled in alright.”

Kylo lets go of her hand, which he has used to stretch her back towards him, and drops down to the mattress. He doesn’t look annoyed, or hurt, but she still feels sad that there’s this _—this—_ between them.

She doesn’t want to stress that she has to do this because her agency might start getting a little anxious to reach her, because it places them back in an arrangement where he’s a potential danger to her. He isn’t, at least only to her sanity, and only in ways she likes. 

She slithers out of the room with her phone and pulls up Facetime for good measure. More proof she’s fine after days of no contact. 

“He’s got you off your game,” Maz laughs her coughing laugh. “I’m impressed.”

Rey tries to keep her smile from being too happy but her eyes from being too unfriendly. Kylo feels more like her territory than Maz’s.

“Sorry I’m late checking in. We’re here. I’m safe.”

“And enjoying yourselves, I see.”

Rey ignores this and for once doesn’t let the call linger out like an appointment. She would compare Maz to one of her advisors in university, or taking office hours from an instructor in the subject of handling men like Kylo. But now, having someone who led her this far only for Rey to be this blind to a man who had apparently loved her, she doesn’t want to stay on the call any longer than she has to. 

Or maybe the reminder of what Maz is in whatever is going on between Rey and Kylo is unwelcome here. 

There just isn’t any wisdom she wants to soak in anymore. The ropes feel learned. 

And this is keeping her from—

Fuck, this is scary.

—it keeps her from what she wants. Which is in the other room. In bed.

So she calls out something about the car being ready and hangs up. She half-runs back to the bedroom, and is chagrined to find the bed empty. 

“You’re back.”

Kylo peers out of the closet at her, half-dressed. 

Rey tries not to deflate in disappointment. 

He threads a belt through his pants. 

“That was quick.”

“Don’t worry. I told her that you send your love, and asked her to send a rescue team for me.”

He neatly tucks his shirt into his pants and re-enters the light spilling into the room from the shadows of the closet. 

He really is stunning to look at. 

What she likes about his body is it’s unpretentious. Which is odd; considering his words and his hair and his interests in contrast to that. But there’s a strength to his bulk that is not from a process of editing the body, hollowing it out. He’s built up strength, power, where most guys just try to carve their abdomens to suit a proper gym selfie. 

She’d put money on him in any fight. 

He wrinkles his nose at even a joke about her being in danger here. But that’s all that’s said about that as her eyes fall on the gift boxes on the bed. 

“What’s that?”

Warmth floods her body. A return to form, but as, what it feels like, completely new people. She wants to see what toys he buys her with his money. What he has planned. 

“A few presents for you. For the end of the semester.”

She grins at him and lets her robe fall open a little bit as she sits down on the bed. 

“Which do I open first?”

He has coffee on the side table, which must have arrived during her call, and he hands over a mug for her too. It’s fun, watching him drink coffee as she opens presents, in the morning. She rarely ever sees him during daybreak, if ever, it’s usually checking out of a hotel together the morning after a wedding. They skipped breakfast during those trips. Even with him dressed, it feels a little like Christmas morning. 

He smirks over the lip of his mug. 

“The little one first. We always work you up for something bigger.”

She rolls her eyes at him and tears at the paper. Even she knows the _LV_ printed on the brown leather. It sits so prettily in her lap. It’s a gorgeous planner, the richest material, and if a little label-whore-y is at least tasteful in that it’s a Louis Vuitton personal agenda and not a handbag she’ll sling for status. It’s a little bit of a statement. A taste of a life. 

A promise. 

“I believe it was the only thing in the store that you wouldn’t force me to return.”

She straightens the square leather booklet in her lap. It’s like a little parcel of _future._ Somehow this tops an engagement ring. 

“It’s the only thing in the store I’d ask for. Thank you for finding it.”

He brightens like someone sent a breath over hot coals. A little more alive than he looked a moment ago. 

There’s another present, and he implied _bigger_ in more ways than just pleasurable. She’s not sure she can take another surprise this week. 

But he’s good at teaching her she can take more from him. 

Rey stands up, leaving the second box neglected. He stirs and looks half-nervous. Like he’s done something wrong, or is about to be rejected. 

She goes to her bag and takes out her old planner. Stuffed to the gills with everything in her life for the last year or so. Her previous favorite gift from him.

“I just—I think this means something, and I didn’t realize until now.”

She pushes it into his hand and then steps away, skirting around him like fire. 

He sets his coffee aside and splits the book open. 

It would be easier if she knew what to tell him to look for. Instead she just places it in his hands and stays put along the far wall of the room. 

What she’s handed him is the past. Her days. Tallied, numbered, segmented. All the parts she gave to him accounted for. 

He flips until the last week pencilled in. 

**Late. Mood: Agitated. Trouble at work?**

He lifts his eyes from the page as if burned. She swallows, her chest rising and falling, as he goes back to flip through her whole life. 

Three days a week. Kylo. No other names. Her classes. Her To-Do lists. Contacts. 

Days. All the one she spent alone when she wasn’t with him. 

He sets the planner aside.

“You were tracking me.”

She nods. 

He blinks for a moment, standing vulnerable in the center of the room as she clings to the wall. 

“Why?”

“It felt like I could control this in some small way if I did that.”

Tears fill the corner of her eyes. She remembers it as a kid. The checkmarks. Just for getting herself through a day of misery. Alone. 

How that tally began to be a part of him as well. Monday was two days until Wednesday. Two days until Kylo. 

“This is extraordinarily detailed,” he doesn’t seem angry, and the confusion also seems to have settled into a fine dust, “Meticulous.”

He shakes his head as he stares at the page in front of him. 

“I think it means,” Rey wets her lips, finding out right along with him what this means, “I think it means I cared about you for longer than I ever knew.”

He steps closer to her. She wants to look away from him but finds she just can’t. There’s too much to lose. It could be her whole future. 

His hand presses her to the wall by her stomach instead of letting her take that final step into him.

“You’d make a damn good private investigator, I should be worried,” he holds up the planner, containing all of her notes and details and observations, “You think I asked you to marry me before we even knew each other. Like we weren’t trying to know each other at all.”

His lips trace the edge of her jaw. She can hear him toss the leather book onto a nearby table. It lands neatly, but even if it exploded into pieces, her hands itch for the fresh start of the new one on the bed. Neater. Less sloppy. Knowing what to keep this time, instead of everything.

He breathes heavily into the curve of her shoulder.

“We should get to your next gift.”

She laughs, guessing that this one is a little more to his tastes. She slips out from between his body and the wall and waves her way to the bed. This one she tears open in that rough, unwrapping way while standing up. Tossing the paper to the floor. 

She bites her lips at the garment box: something to put on, probably, and her head tilts in curiosity to lift the lid and—

It’s not leather or lace or something to tempt him to touch. Unknot. Untangle. 

It’s a suit for her. 

A warm-toned cream blazer and trousers. The blazer is double-breasted with a darting at the waist that looks like it would just eat up her slender form. The cut is nipped very precisely. The color is one she loves, not somber, soft like sand. 

She sets the jacket out flat on the bed and the pants beside it, like she’s going to put in on today, which is impossible given the heat. 

“I thought you’d wear it when you have interviews after you graduate,” his hands slide around her waist as he comes up behind her. 

Rey glances over her shoulder at him, a little stunned. 

“I assumed—after I graduated, we’d be getting married.”

Her timeline seems to run a little quicker than his. He laughs against her neck. 

“What were you picturing?”

His tone seeks to be indulged. What _was_ she picturing? Shopping all day, laying around bonelessly on furniture until he came home to fuck her?

“I don’t know I just—didn’t see you letting me work. Not like you would forbid me. But it not being—necessary—anymore.”

“It’s not necessary,” he agrees, his hands darting down to clutch her hips, drawing her into his body. “You could let me take care of you for the rest of your days. But I never thought you wanted that.”

She doesn’t. And this being more like the thing that she wants, something he encourages, something he wants her to be excited for.

She remembers that flash when they first met: and what she’d suppressed, that she’d gone home and cried when he’d talked about helping her be independent. 

Not reliant. 

“It’s your future,” he presses a kiss to her shoulder as he nears behind her, “I just want to be a part of it.”

She feels like she’s being tipped over the edge, like she can see the future not in front of her, but beneath her and viewed from the highest vantage point: something spread out and all hers, that thrill-ride of possibility and choice.

* * *

They are not transformed by this vacation. He’s still quiet. Even when he’s with her, no phone, she can tell he thinks too much about work. She still has doubts. She still wants him to fold her over the kitchen island and spank her until she’s crying for reprieve. 

He is still more comfortable with that, or at least after, when he gets to peel off her panties and kiss her red skin and coo at her that everything will be alright while she quivers for him. 

They’re still themselves: but they’ve always strangely worked together. 

One evening she does a smaller dance for him, hips swaying, hands coming up to cup her breasts over her bikini top, like the one he didn’t get on his pole-less jet, as a thank you. He looks on, upright on the edge of a lawn chair while she twists between his knees. Hands appropriately at his sides. The grass is in the shade, but her skin is cast in warm sunlight, so there’s a biting coolness against her toes as her skin glows with light and heat.

She’s doing a pathetic doggy-paddle to him in the depths of the lake. It’s still beautiful, clear water, but the slide of her feet against slimy stones at the bottom have a way of making her forget the picturesque. He captures her in his arms in this valiant hold when she does reach him, every time, like a storybook where a sailor catches a mermaid. 

He scoops her out of the water, first elegantly, and then he gasps and staggers backwards to dramatically splash them both as he comes down with her flailing in his arms. 

“Not nice,” she tightens her arms around his neck, “I can’t swim very well.”

Water drips from his face as he gloats at her. They’re both up to their chins. 

“But you trust me to keep you safe.”

She doesn’t want to already be clinging to him when he gets to say that. She swallows and looks at him, and he rises himself up out of the water so their shoulders are above the surface.

This is the most they’ve spoken since they’d gotten into the water. He offered her a hand down the stony shore and drifted away once they splashed in, indicating to her to swim to him.

She can hear his low voice even when he’s not speaking as she struggled her way over to him. 

_Practice, it’s the only way to learn._

She has to ask. It’s bothering her.

“Why are you so quiet with me?”

He reaches for her with a sad smile, but instead of touching her cheek or the base of her skull, normal places where he graces her with a gentle hand, he touches her at the center of her forehead. A tap repeats the intention of the gesture. Her skull feels like a jar full of bees, and he’s tapping on the glass agitating them.

“Because you’re so noisy.”

If she’s honest, it’s what makes her decision.

* * *

She goes up to him during dinner. She’s oddly quiet, especially since he’s not on the phone. It’s vaguely nice, warming her inside, even, to watch him eat without it pressed to his ear. 

One minute he’s eating his food, innocently unaware, and glances up at her and stops when she pushes out her chair and walks over to him. It’s an early meal, the sun is still out, and there’s faint birdsong in all the trees that surround them. When she comes towards him, he makes to stand up for her out of courtesy. 

Rey shakes her head quickly. He falls heavily back into his chair. 

She stands at his feet.

Her arms slither around his neck.

All he seems to want to do is understand her. The work he put in for just three days a week is a tip of a ginormous iceberg. To accomplish figuring out as much as he did, he must have thought about her constantly. 

It’s daunting, like trying to conquer his prone body all at once. But if she focuses, if she plans like he plans—

They could be very happy together.

“I think I finally get it,” she touches her thumb to the pronounced chord of his tense throat. “What my options are. And if one of them meant you’d be alone, you were going to give me a counter-offer that was too good to refuse.”

His head falls forward, hands gripping her hips, a strange, needy sound resonating in his chest. She cards her fingers into his soft hair, because she feels like she can touch him now. She was always supposed to be the illusion of what he wanted. Then he demanded honesty. Yet he was the most unreal part of all of it. 

He’s real now, warmed by the sun, flaming a sweet pink under his collar at the nape of his neck from a mild sunburn. 

“It is,” she wets her lips, breathing hard, “too good to refuse.”

She holds him tighter, hitching his hunched form higher up against her body as he further collapses by her words. God, it’s like he’s melting. She always thought he was the most solid substance known to man.

“I _can’t_ refuse,” she clenches her jaw as she cries, “I can’t. I can’t refuse.”

His arms shake when they slide around her hips. They tighten until she can scarcely breathe. 

“Will you—?”

“Yes, I’ll marry you.”

* * *

Maz may have ripped all the papers on her desk, whether they were bound in a folder or not, clean in half in a fit of rage if she heard how this wedding was happening. 

First, Kylo told Rey he had a lawyer at the ready with a draft of a prenup drawn: which was open to her own stipulations and further negotiation. _A jumping off point._ He thought his terms were fair, but he had wanted her to feel safe. No pressure. They could go home and start discussing the prenup in more detail and begin the process of a long engagement, do everything right, start on all the steps they had skipped to get to the good part. 

And he looked at her when he told her this like Rey could suck him dry if she wanted to and he’d still look for more to give.

Rey said no to that plan. 

The decision to do so would have put Maz in cardiac arrest, to have a millionaire eating out of the palm of your hand and going in to it like it was for forever, but it felt right to Rey. 

She didn’t want a contract. Just vows.

She had really wanted to do this like it changed things between them for good. There was an idea in her head that she would accept no compromise for. He had handled the proposal: she wanted her wedding. 

She wants it here. And now. 

So she willingly went shopping for the only time in her life, and bought herself a white dress. A cake was being iced when she came back through the door with her bags. Kylo gave her a bouquet. That was his errand. Flowers and rings. 

Once they are both home at Varykino, they seem more concerned with resting off their labors than the occasion. Rey takes a shower and nap, Kylo takes a nap and a shower: eclipsing her in the stolen hour in their bed, nuzzling her warm skin, breathing her clean smell. 

She waits for the moment when he asks her if this is really what she wants. Just with a justice on the patio. Practically secret. He’s already promised her as big or small a wedding as she wants, or to do it all again when they get back to the States. 

That’s more of a question to think about later. What wedding suits a life they’ve built, not two lives they joined. 

Yet as her hands move absently across his chest, pretending she’s still sleepier than she is so he stays and lets her touch him, he doesn’t ask her that. He trusts her to tell him what she wants. And this is the first one she asks for. 

_Don’t make me wait. Marry me now._

Before he dresses, he brings her a snack, and sits her down on one thigh covered in the soft towel he had tied around his waist. 

They split a grapefruit—in a way.

He holds her against his massive body and squeezes out the juices into her open mouth, splashing her lips and jaw occasionally when she whimpers for more of a taste. 

With a certain self-control that she just lacks, he traces his tongue up one single errant drip that has worked its way down her neck. 

“These are made to be eaten off of you.”

One day she is going to mash one of those into his bare chest and lap it up, pulp and all, from his skin. With him tied up. She is going to try everything.

Now she feels so held, so contained, it was almost a farce to have to leave this moment to perform a wedding when she had never felt so completely _his_ as she was, just like this. 

His arm folds across her waist, pinning her back to his chest.

“You know I’ll feed you, and take care of you, and love you for the rest of my life?”

Her robe slides down one shoulder and he presses a kiss to the bare skin. She squirms in his lap, her hips rolling for friction against the towel, as she is naked under her silk robe and the rough material is the only thing that parts their skin. 

“You know I’ll listen to you, and watch all the boring movies you love, and always let you know you’re not alone?”

His hands shake against her body, he has felt so strong beneath her until then. They are about to exchange official vows: but these feel solid and clear. 

“I had to have you,” he groans into her ear, lifting his hand to stroke between her legs. His thumb worries the chorded muscle of her thigh, tickling her until her legs shakes, while his fingers tease her seam. He’d pouted quite excessively when she denied him a peek at her dress. She supposed some premarital playing around would suffice. “Ever since I first saw you I had to have you any way I could. _Every way I could.”_

* * *

There was a tension that came over them both when they were plunged into a world after the words declaring them married were spoken. Neither moved as if they would disturb that reality from properly resting into truth. 

It was blazing hot when they were married alongside the stone railing overlooking the placid blue lake. The sunlight worked itself into a fury before slipping itself down the sky to be forgotten by night. Rey felt the heat soak into her skin, favoring one side, her flowers drooping by the end of their vows like they were going to melt like ice cream. 

It was an intimate ceremony. Focused. Intense. It was the ceremony for the man she was marrying. She could tell he was happy. 

And that she loved him. 

They were able to speak in murmurs because they quieted each other. It was a short ceremony. When it was over, the justice and witness left them in contemplation. What better place to do it than overlooking the water at Varykino. 

She didn’t know how to explain it to him, that this place felt like home. Or that he did. The same person, just with an unlocked door. She stared at the mess of her wilting flowers, still beautiful if burned, and didn’t know what to say if not that, if anything at all.

His hand came over the stone railing in front of them, the height of his hip. He always made the world look like it belonged to him: but this exact spot was a place where he belonged. His hand was flared out in the last, grasping touch of sunlight before it vanished. 

And then it’d come back. And it would do it again. 

She set her hand on the stone beside his. 

“My grandparents were married at this same spot.”

A heady giggle rushed out of her. Then she covered his hand in hers.

“You neglected to tell me that part.”

He bowed his head, hiding a shy but radiant grin. His smile was so sweet. That had to be why he hid it. She cupped his cheek and brought it to face her, her thumb running along his lower lip to sweep the creases that lined that smile. 

He was really something beautiful. And hers. 

“You didn’t even plan for the wedding to be here,” she almost choked on her laughter when she realized that this had not been a detail he had any hand in. It was just the prettiest part of the property. She’d picked it without any input from him. 

There was a blush just above his smile. 

“Doesn’t mean I didn’t imagine it.”

His eyes said he had, probably a thousand times. A part of himself he held distant, didn't think she wanted, didn't express. For every part of him that felt that way, there had been a part of her. 

Not anymore. He wants to be there while she figures things out and screws up. For all the things she needed: in his way. And she's going to be there for what he needs in hers. 

They are going to try everything together. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No one learns anything I specifically tagged no learning. 
> 
> Thank you guys for how kind you've been about this story! I am so overwhelmed by the feedback. Thank you so much to Vi for beta-reading for me: her notes elevated this entire process so much for me. 
> 
> I have another WIP from this spring I want to wrap up and a few more updates to other ongoing fics, but then I have an exciting new A/B/O/Catholicism story I've been working on that will probably go out the end of July. I hope you guys read it!

**Author's Note:**

> A huge thanks to [@hrotsvitha_g](https://twitter.com/hrotsvitha_g), [@voicedimplosive](https://twitter.com/voicedimplosive) , and [@ViWiWrites](https://twitter.com/ViWiWrites) for taking a look at this story for me in its various stages (holy shit, the power behind this! Literally an Avengers Team-Up cheering me on. I’m so blessed.)


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